Why Harvard?

 Answering Kennedy’s Call

“But the Trumpist effort to destroy Harvard and other elite universities — for that is clearly their intention — will do vast damage to our nation’s future.” Paul Krugman

           FREDERIC J. BROWN/AFP/Getty Images)

Huffington Post

The dumbing down of the Republican party has a history long before I began to write about it in The Huffington Post. The attempt to dumb down Harvard University that Paul Krugman is talking about, by wanting to control even its curriculum and course content, is the latest attempt to bring down our educational system to the Republican Party’s dismal intellectual level.

When one political party needs ignorance to keep its followers in compliance, believing whatever the party hacks want its followers to believe, its messages will be based on conspiracy theories, rumors, or made up fictions, as Trump does with his accusations that Harvard has anti-Semitic policies.

His habitual lying hides the unpleasant truth that he just wants to pick the wallets of his followers. It’s why the poorest Americans live in Republican-controlled red states.

I first witnessed it in 2015 during the CNN Republican candidate debate that seemed to be a prolonged campaign to discount almost all scientific facts, as well as intelligent discussion of the most important issues of the day.

Especially scary was Donald Trump saying if we build up our military enough, we won't have to negotiate with anybody. Or Marco Rubio, the seemingly most moderate Republican, endorsing a 1,900 mile fence along our entire border with Mexico (or double fence, says Dr. Ben Carson) over mountains and rivers, or Carli Fiorina saying that Planned Parenthood was aborting live babies to harvest their organs.

But the anti-intellectual, anti-science bias goes much further and deeper. It is in fact an almost totally American phenomenon that Republicans have taken advantage of in an attempt to dumb down the electorate to levels that would even deny evolution.

Why would anyone not want to support public education, when it educates more than 80 percent of our students? The result is that higher education is also falling behind.

According to the National Research Council, only 28 percent of high school science teachers consistently follow the National Research Council guidelines on teaching evolution, and 13 percent of those teachers explicitly advocate creationism or "intelligent design," said Psychology Today in a very damning 2014 article entitled, Anti-Intellectualism and the Dumbing Down of America:

"After leading the world for decades in 25-34 year olds with university degrees, the U.S. is now in 12th place," said Psychology Today. "The World Economic Forum ranked the U.S. at 52nd among 139 nations in the quality of its university math and science instruction in 2010. Nearly 50 percent of all graduate students in the sciences in the U.S. are foreigners, most of whom are returning to their home countries"

What else was debated in 2015, before Trump won his first term in the White House? Republican candidates were echoing the Republican platform that advocated the deportation of all illegal aliens, would abolish or cripple whole government agencies (including the Environmental Protection Agency), shut down the federal government over Planned Parenthood funding, and maintain that a fertilized egg is a viable human being that can't be aborted.

I reported then (in 2015) journalist Chris Hedges said in a PBS interview that President Clinton in co opting moderate Republican positions, such as deregulation of the financial industry, putting 100,000 more cops on the street, and 'reforming' welfare, had driven the Republican Party to "insanity".

That’s as good a description of what Trump’s MAGA Republicans are attempting to do again. Isn’t it the perfect definition of insanity—doing the same things over and over again, expecting different results?

Harlan Green © 2025

Follow Harlan Green on Twitter: https://twitter.com/HarlanGreen

Why Is This Election Still a Tossup?

 Answering Kennedy’s Call

What is the reason Republicans have become the party of anti-intellectuals? The danger is that it may drown out any intelligent discourse about the most important issues of our day. It's driving at least one of our political parties into insanely ridiculous positions.

Barack and Michelle Obama warned last night at the Democratic Convention that it will still be an uphill slog to beat Donald Trump and his Republican Party. “Make no mistake, it will still be a fight,” said President Obama last night, even though Trump is now a convicted felon, and showing visible signs of mental deterioration.

This has become blatantly obvious now that a younger and vibrant Kamala Harris has replaced President Biden as his opponent, and Trump is no longer leading in the polls.

But it is still a contest for the same reason Trump won in 2016; when I first wrote about the presidential debates; he is leading a party that has intentionally been dumbed down since the 1970s, at least. And nothing has changed for them.

Huffington Post

We saw in the 2016 CNN Republican candidate debate the results of what seems to be a prolonged campaign to discount almost all scientific facts, as well as intelligent discussion of the most important issues of the day.

Especially scary was Donald Trump saying if we build up our military enough, we won't have to negotiate with anybody. Or Marco Rubio, the seemingly most moderate Republican, endorsing a 1,900 mile fence along our entire border with Mexico (or double fence, says Dr. Ben Carson) over mountains and rivers, or Carli Fiorina saying that Planned Parenthood was aborting live babies to harvest their organs.

Global warming is one of the most important issues today, since there is almost unanimous agreement among scientists that it is man-made and rising alarmingly. Hence the record heatwaves, cold spells and catastrophic storms the world has been experiencing recently. Yet thanks to the funding of multi-billionaires like the Koch Brothers, none of the Republican Presidential candidates said they believe global warming is man-made, or even real.

What is the reason Republicans have become the party of anti-intellectuals--some members even want to abolish the Department of Education, and otherwise defund public education? Journalist Chris Hedges said in a PBS interview President Clinton in coopting moderate Republican positions, such as deregulation of the financial industry, putting 100,000 more cops on the street, and 'reforming' welfare, had driven the Republican Party to "insanity"

But the anti-intellectual, anti-science bias goes much further and deeper. It is in fact an almost totally American phenomenon that Republicans have taken advantage of, dumbing down the electorate to levels that would even deny evolution. Why would anyone not want to support public education, when it educates more than 80 percent of our students? The result is that higher education is also falling behind.

According to the National Research Council, only 28 percent of high school science teachers consistently follow the National Research Council guidelines on teaching evolution, and 13 percent of those teachers explicitly advocate creationism or "intelligent design," said Psychology Today in a very damning 2014 article entitled, Anti-Intellectualism and the Dumbing Down of America:

"After leading the world for decades in 25-34 year olds with university degrees, the U.S. is now in 12th place," said Psychology Today. "The World Economic Forum ranked the U.S. at 52nd among 139 nations in the quality of its university math and science instruction in 2010. Nearly 50 percent of all graduate students in the sciences in the U.S. are foreigners, most of whom are returning to their home countries"

Republican candidates were echoing the Republican platform that advocated the deportation of all illegal aliens, that would abolish or cripple whole government agencies (including the Environmental Protection Agency), shut down the federal government over Planned Parenthood funding, and maintain that a fertilized egg is a viable human being that can't be aborted.

Pundits give other reasons for such a dumbing down of a segment of the electorate--such as social media and television replacing literacy, or education that no longer teaches math and science or even history. Maybe that has enabled the Donald Trumps of the world to shout louder.

The danger is that it may drown out any intelligent discourse. It's driving at least one of our political parties into insanely ridiculous positions.

Harlan Green © 2024

Follow Harlan Green on Twitter: https://twitter.com/HarlanGreen

Why the Irrational Pessimism--Part II

 Financial FAQs

I said a week ago that public polls seem to be saying one thing, economic facts another. Real Clear Politics’ compendium of 11 opinion polls on whether participants approve or disapprove of President Biden’s handling of the economy show a negative -22.5 percent spread (pro Trump, contra Biden).

But as Paul Krugman pointed out more recently, it’s Republicans driving that narrative, not U.S. adult citizens or Democrats.

Krugman/YouGov

Why? The big difference is that Republicans feel much worse for a number of reasons and that can skew the results.

Krugman cited a YouGov survey showing that overall 33% of U.S. adult citizens felt great-to-good personally about 2023 while 27 percent felt bad-terrible about 2023 for the country—pretty balanced.

With Democrats, however, 44% felt great-good while just 16% felt bad-terrible personally, whereas just 29% of Republicans felt great-good vs. 31% felt bad-terrible. You can begin to see the trend.

But there’s a big difference over how constituents felt overall about the country in 2023. Democrats felt much better about 2023—35% to 6% for Republicans, while a whopping 76 percent of Republicans thought 2023 was a bad or terrible year for the country, vs. 35 % of Democrats.

What does that tell us? Mainly that the two parties must get their information from different sources, which speaks to either the fact that the economic benefits of record low unemployment and economic growth in 2023 haven’t filtered down to the red states where Republicans dominate, or a willful ignorance about the facts.

It goes back to Nobel Laureate Robert Shiller’s thesis in his book, Irrational Exuberance; that most economic decisions are formed not by researching the facts but hearsay, word-of-mouth stories, or lazy thinking—i.e., not thinking through the hard news but following the stories that make them feel comfortable.

But it also heavily weights surveys such as Real Clear towards the dominant results—in this case the 76 percent of Republicans who believe 2023 was a terrible year.

Or, perhaps the negative opinions of Republicans about the economy have nothing to do with the economy or their personal well-being.

Maybe it has to do with deep-seated prejudices such as an inherent belief that new immigrants don’t benefit them; or females shouldn’t be allowed to control their own health, a very skewed belief system that babies lives take precedence over their mothers’?

It also calls into question what was once our storied educational system. We were the first country to institute universal K-12 education. But now our K-12 system ranks at the bottom of developed countries in the latest surveys.

Some red states are also banning books from school curriculums and libraries, even persecuting librarians and K-12 teachers for advocating them. Is our public K-12 educational system no longer adequate to maintain a Democracy?

Harlan Green © 2024

Harlan Green on Twitter: https://twitter.com/HarlanGreen

Deaths of Despair, Part II—The Wall of Ignorance

 Answering the Kennedys’ Call

NBER.org

Something can be done about the “Deaths of Despair” among the non-college educated white males that Anne Case and Angus Deaton have been writing about that I discussed in Deaths of Despair, Part I, and has been exacerbated by the current COVID-induced recession.

But first we must counteract the wall of ignorance that has blocked efforts to ameliorate their suffering to date, a wall that was built on the denial of scientific studies from epidemiologists and the Trump administration’s own experts at the CDC and other NIH entities.

The Trump administration is responsible for the misinformation campaign that has denied the efficacy of mask-wearing and testing to control the pandemic, for starters. And, harsh as it may sound, the Republican Party is largely responsible for the dumbing down of its electorate with its continual denial of basic scientific knowledge that confirms even the most basic scientific facts, such as for global warming and even evolution.

The coronavirus pandemic is wreaking havoc among the less-educated Americans, according to Case and Deaton, who wrote about the growing divide between those with a four-year college degree and those without in their recent book, Deaths of Despair and the Future of Capitalism.

“The rise in deaths that we describe is concentrated almost entirely among those without a bachelor’s degree, a qualification that also tends to divide people in terms of employment, remuneration, morbidity, marriage, and social esteem – all keys to a good life,’ said Case and Deaton.”

The economic disparities are growing due to the pandemic. In April, nearly 12 million low-wage workers were laid off, while some 6 million workers who were earning between $18 to $29 an hour were laid off. By November, all but 400,000 of those workers earning $18 to $29 an hour had returned to work, Raj Chetty, a Harvard economics professor, has said. Meanwhile, some 6 million workers who earned less than $13 an hour have yet to return to work.

The pandemic and recession were associated with a 10 percent to 60 percent increase in deaths of despair above already high pre-pandemic levels, according to a working paper by Casey Mulligan, professor of economics at the University of Chicago. He found these non-COVID excess deaths are disproportionately experienced by men aged 15-55, per the above NBER graph.

“Mortality in 2020 significantly exceeds what would have occurred if official COVID deaths were combined with a normal number of deaths from other causes,” he wrote. “The demographic and time patterns of the non-COVID excess deaths (NCEDs) point to deaths of despair rather than an undercount of COVID deaths. The flow of NCEDs increased steadily from March to June and then plateaued. They were disproportionately experienced by working aged men, including men as young as aged 15 to 24.”

Because drug epidemics tend to follow major episodes of “social upheaval and destruction”, we can expect more of the same economic disparities and consequent social unrest that has followed, unless something is done.

And that requires a major educational effort to bolster K-12 public education institutions that have been purposely downplayed by Trump’s own Department of Education, in favor of private, for-profit learning, even transferring funds earmarked for public education to for-profit programs.

The high wall of ignorance that has built up over more than a decade of denial of scientific knowledge by one political party is a wall that needs to be torn down to even begin to mitigate the social unrest among those suffering from Deaths of Despair and rebuild their faith in democratic processes.

Harlan Green © 2020

Follow Harlan Green on Twitter: https://twitter.com/HarlanGreen

Tuition-Free College Is Possible

ANSWERING THE KENNEDYS CALL

Graph: ;MarketWatch

Yes, an excellent, tuition-free college education is possible. In fact, it’s become a movement supported by non-profit organizations, as well as cities and states that support their institutions of higher learning with taxpayer monies. Nationally, the College Promise Campaign is making news with its message and outreach stated on its website, CollegePromise.org.

“The College Promise Campaign is a national, non-partisan initiative to build broad public support for funding the first two years of higher education for hard-working students, starting in America’s community colleges. We want the first two years of college to become as universal, free, and accessible as high school has been for nearly a century,” said College Promise on it website.

That’s a start. College students have borrowed some $1.5 trillion to date with an average debt load of $35,000 per student. This wasn’t always the case for public colleges and universities. Until the 1960s, taxpayers paid most of the cost for state-run higher education, such as at the University of California system of nine UC universities and the 23 California State college campuses created to take in all eligible students that weren’t accepted to the nine UC campuses.

The programs vary, from scholarships that pay for 2 years of community college, to grants and scholarships that pay for all four years. But many of those colleges and universities are in smaller, out of the way locations, where educational costs are cheaper, and said institutions are eager to lure students away from the major metropolitan centers.

The above MarketWatch graph shows the huge cost disparities between public and private colleges, and many studies confirm that a public college or university education breeds as much success on reaching student life goals as do private schools.

The College Promise Campaign, a clearinghouse and advocacy organization for free-college initiatives, counts more than 200 programs across the country offering some version of a promise program. But that is hardly enough, when most other developed countries offer a tuition-free higher education.

In fact, most EU and non-EU Nordic countries offer tuition-free college education to foreigners, as well as their own citizens. They can be found on the Top Universities website, and include France, Germany, Norway, Iceland, Finland, Denmark, and Sweden. Even South American countries, such as Argentina offer a tuition-free college education to foreign students.

These countries put the American educational system to shame. They seem to understand the importance of higher education in improving the productivity and prosperity of their citizens. What could be more important that educating our workforce in an ever-changing world, where a college degree becomes even more important?

Cornell University is the only major U.S. land-grant institution that is tuition-free for students from low and middle-income families earning less than $60,000 annually. Its description is heartening—if only other large, public universities would follow:

“Established in 1865, Cornell University is a privately endowed research university and a partner of the State University of New York. As the federal land-grant institution in New York State, Cornell has a responsibility—unique within the Ivy League—to make contributions in all fields of knowledge in a manner that prioritizes public engagement to help improve the quality of life in New York state, the nation, the world. Cornell is located in Ithaca, New York and enrolls nearly 22,000 students. With an acceptance rate of over 10%, Cornell is the Ivy League institution with the highest acceptance rate.”

America needs more such education programs, if we are to compete in the modern world.

Harlan Green © 2018

Follow Harlan Green on Twitter: https://twitter.com/HarlanGreen