On Dec 6, 2011, at 11:03 AM, Michael Smith wrote:
> On Tue, 6 Dec 2011 10:36:07 -0500
> Doug Henwood <dhenwood at panix.com> wrote:
>
>> One of the reasons the right hates higher ed is that...
>> academia is one of the few
>> places in the USA where people can think critically and get paid for
>> it. Thus the canon wars and all that. But also: make it more
>> expensive and foreground the economic payoff lest people take all
>> those impractical courses where they "interrogate" stuff.
>
> There seems to be a generous quantity of surmise in this
> account. Perhaps simpler and less conjectural explanations
> might be entertained; the Right dislikes public expenditure
> generally, on anything except police, prisons, and soldier
> boys; and the Right hates profs because most of 'em are
> liberals.
The last phrase makes my point. The right hates academia because it's their political enemy.
Sometimes I think that the right takes ideas more seriously than the left.
Doug