Tone deaf college president smears people who disagree with her as racist

The following article was discussed at our college recently: https://www.diverseeducation.com/opinion/article/15684679/dumbing-down-america

“Dumbing Down America” is a screed by Patricia McGuire, president of Trinity Washington University, a nominally Catholic university in Washington, DC. Ms. McGuire is outraged that anyone dare question the value of a college education. A college education is required for a successful and fulfilling life. If you disagree, it is probably because you hate “Black and Brown people” and don’t want them to have a happy life; “white [sic] people” are mentioned as well, but only in lowercase.

Ms. McGuire substantiates her histrionic and incorrect claims by citing the presidential campaign of Donald Trump, who declared proudly that he loves “the uneducated”. Ms. McGuire, a right-thinking intellectual, is properly horrified; presumably this good Catholic does not love the uneducated.

Patricia McGuire

This does not look like a happy person.

The day after McGuire’s column, almost as a rebuttal, came Jonathan Turley’s column: https://jonathanturley.org/2024/09/26/what-happens-if-we-hold-college-and-nobody-comes/

“What if we hold college and nobody comes?” is a playful echo of the question during the 1960s, “What if they held a war and nobody came?” It is quite relevant today, in light of the sinking enrollment in “higher education”. The decline in enrollment has multiple causes, including a decline in the size of the traditional college-age cohort; what has been described misleadingly as a strong job market (only for those who are foreign-born); and inflation, which has enriched the metastasizing bureaucracy in academia at the expense of students and faculty.

Turley focuses most closely, however, on the issue that has caused the public to lose trust in academia: namely, indoctrination replacing education. His column has documented this issue for years (leaving me to wonder why on earth he remains a Democrat), and this article includes many of the relevant links.

Some of my colleagues smirk about the salary advantage college graduates allegedly have over “the uneducated” (although this is not consistent with their professed progressive values). I would like to see a comparison of the salaries of a journeyman electrician or plumber with the salaries of a person with a bachelor’s degree in human services or communication, not to mention the student debt of these individuals.

Maybe, just maybe, people across America are waking up and saying, “I think I won’t spend tens of thousands of dollars for four years in order to be scolded continually by people like Patricia McGuire.”