Political interference in higher education, we are told, is increasing. The partisan divide in views on higher education, we hear, is deepening. Campuses “are driving political division.” “The diploma divide lies “at the heart of this country’s many divisions.”
Is it the case, as a recent article in The Chronicle of Higher Education seems to suggest, that colleges and universities were venerated in the past and that only since the 1960s became punching bags or political cannon fodder, caught (to mix metaphors) in the cross-hairs of conservative ideologues?
