It appears that being unrelentingly woke means that you need fewer dormitories. The University of Oregon is facing a major budget crisis and will cut $65 million from its budget and close dorms due to low enrollment. That growing crisis, however, did not stop Oregon from burning almost a million dollars fighting against free speech. It also did not induce its faculty to offer greater intellectual diversity and tolerance to prospective students. Oregon is a cautionary tale for a generation of academic social warriors, but also an opportunity for those who want to restore balance in higher education.
Oregon has long been an example of academic orthodoxy. While most state schools begrudgingly yield to First Amendment demands and offer better free speech alternatives to private universities, Oregon is known as a hardened silo for the far left in teaching.
We previously discussed how Portland State University Professor Bruce Gilley who was blocked from the Twitter account of the University of Oregon’s Division of Equity and Inclusion after tweeting “All men are created equal.” Oregon spent almost a million dollars fighting to bar such speech.
Such controversies have plagued the university for years, with no sign of self-examination by administrators or academics. The university was criticized for its monitoring of social media to punish errant thoughts or microaggressions. The law school’s law review was accused of anti-Israel discrimination.
The school previously gave special recognition to University of California (Santa Barbara) Professor Mireille Miller-Young, who criminally assaulted pro-life advocates on the campus of the University of California at Santa Barbara. At the University of Oregon, she was honored as a featured speaker at the University of Oregon’s Department of Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies. Part of its “black feminist speaker series,” Miller-Young’s work was highlighted by the College of Arts and Sciences and the Department of English to show “the radical potential of black feminism in the work that we do on campus and in our everyday lives.”
Now, the school is facing declining revenues and enrollments.
President Karl Scholz recently announced that this was due to lower out-of-state first-year enrollment, which means lower tuition revenue, increased costs, and a loss of grant funding.
Strangely, while closing dorms, the school is still building two new dorms.
Putting aside the school’s past budget judgment and discipline, the university’s reputation for intellectual orthodoxy deters many who do not want to pay tuition for their children to be indoctrinated or silenced. Even with plunging trust in higher education, administrators and faculty cannot resist the temptation to exclude opposing voices.
Oregon is not the only school facing such shortfalls. Some woke institutions have closed entirely. The irony is that faculty would seem to prefer to see their institutions die than restore balance to their departments. However, this may offer a real opportunity for legislators and donors to force real changes in the culture of these schools.
As I have previously written, parents and students who value free speech must increasingly look to public universities where faculty are subject to constitutional guarantees. Public universities may be the final line of defense for free-speech advocates.
We now largely have two systems of higher education for those seeking education with a diversity of opinions and viewpoints. Except for outliers like the University of Chicago and other private universities holding the line on free speech, the orthodoxy found at private universities remains a barrier to many conservative and independent thinkers.
If we are to protect these bastions of free speech, legislatures will need to play a more active role in addressing the exclusion of both faculty candidates and speakers on public campuses. Too many faculty members continue to take the view that citizens are a captive audience expected to continue funding their departments, while excluding conservative or dissenting views held by many, if not most, citizens in a given state.
If faculty members want to continue maintaining echo chambers for their own viewpoints, they should have to seek private donors to sustain such intolerance and orthodoxy.
Legislatures can demand evidence that schools are maintaining intellectually diverse faculties in determining the level of continued support from citizens.
When some of us have argued for such campaigns, academics hypocritically claim that we are calling for political litmus tests or hiring based on political parties. It is an absurd argument that I have previously addressed, including in my book “The Indispensable Right: Free Speech in an Age of Rage.”
The call is for donors and legislators to withhold funding until they see real reforms, including greater diversity on faculties. They are not directing the hiring but looking at the results. The faculty members objecting to such calls have watched passively (or actively supported) the purging of conservative or libertarian faculty from universities and colleges.
When confronted by their own obvious ideological litmus tests, they shrug. Some acknowledge that their departments are overwhelmingly liberal, but insist that they just cannot find “competent” or “intellectually promising” conservatives. A few will admit that they do not believe that conservative views have a place in their departments.
It is impossible to deny the purging of faculties to create an academic echo chamber. If a large corporation effectively eliminated women or minorities while claiming no conscious discrimination, they would be trounced in court.
For years, I have raised concerns about the intolerance in higher education and surveys showing that many departments no longer have a single Republican as faculty members replicate their own views and values. There is no evidence that any faculty members (including those acknowledging the loss of virtually all faculty from the right of center) are honestly willing to reform their schools.
That ideological echo chamber is hardly an enticement for many facing rising tuition costs and relatively little hope of being taught by faculty with opposing views.
A Georgetown study recently found that only nine percent of law school professors identify as conservative at the top 50 law schools — almost identical to the percentage of Trump voters found in the new poll.
There is little evidence that faculty members are interested in changing this culture or creating greater diversity at schools. In places like North Carolina State University a study found that Democrats outnumbered Republicans 20 to 1.
As college and university presidents face these shortfalls, it is time for legislators and donors to demand real proof of diversity in hiring and a change in the culture of these institutions. Otherwise, schools like Oregon will continue to close dorms as they push wokeness over wisdom.
I have visited over 50 college campuses. The building is insane. The costs are insane
Time to END federal aid to these colleges and States…The states fund these public universities.
A College President told me, 30% of colleges are going to go under for their insanity
I mean really…how many gender and black study students do you need? Answer ZERO!
Four thoughts.
1. The first course for many new college students is Hate 101, which is more like a catechism than an academic adventure.
2. Faculty recruitment committees are more like a Inquisitory boards, always seeking purity in the candidates’ wokeism, now a secular religion.
3. While this worked for a generation or two, citizens have grown tired of their children regarding activism as a career choice.
4. The problem is that in Oregon, wokeism has become like their forest-living nemesis, the pine bark beetle. It has burrowed in, and is now killing its future crop of people.
If you multiply the “on the ground” effect of each of your points by a factor of ten, you might be getting close the reality of the slow rolling disaster.
gdonaldallen,
“3. While this worked for a generation or two, citizens have grown tired of their children regarding activism as a career choice.”
It is rather curious how the protesters outside of the Delaney Hall facility, whom have been there for days or weeks (?) now, with all those supplies, what jobs do they hold?
And as NJ governor pointed out, some of those people, whom got arrested for assault and violence, were from Portland OR.
” what jobs do they hold?”
Paid protesters.
Who are the organizers who fund and execute these out-of-control mob scenes?
I can’t provide that information in a verifiable way, but one can look at people like Singham, Soros, and many others who reliable sources have named.
Money pollutes the media as well, and big money will influence investigative writers. As an example, look at the Tarbell Center, which aligns with heavy regulation and the tech-sceptic left seen in the Democrat Party.
Catherine Cassidy,
Here are some who are doing real investigative journalism, Secret Signal chats reveal how anti-ICE agitators coordinated Newark riots
https://www.foxnews.com/politics/secret-signal-chats-reveal-how-anti-ice-agitators-coordinated-newark-riots?utm_source=referral&utm_medium=offthepress&utm_campaign=home
Professor Turley’s claims about conservatives being “purged” from universities is plain ol’ fashioned BS.
The primary reason for the imbalance of political leanings on college campuses is self-selection. Study after study shows that individuals with conservative political viewpoints simply choose not to pursue PhDs or seek careers in academia at the same rate as liberals.
Remember Conservatives have an aversion to higher education. The anti-intellectualism speaks for itself. Why would they go to do what they are against?
A comprehensive study by political scientists Jon Shields and Joshua Dunn Sr. found that conservatives are vastly more attracted to high-earning, practical sectors like business, law, engineering, and private industry rather than the low-paying, highly grueling track of academic publishing and tenure.
Peer-reviewed data indicates that the political divide begins before anyone steps foot on a university campus. More liberal-leaning high school students choose to attend college and pursue humanities/social science graduate degrees, while conservative students naturally self-select into other career fields. You cannot “purge” a demographic that isn’t applying in the first place.
Turley relies on aggregate, sweeping statistics—such as a Georgetown study showing only 9% of law professors at top schools identify as conservative—to claim an institutional purge. This completely misrepresents how varied academia actually is.
Data compiled by the Heterodox Academy highlights that while the humanities (English, Gender Studies, Sociology) lean heavily left, fields like Economics, Business Administration, Accounting, and STEM fields maintain a significantly higher proportion of moderate and conservative faculty members.
Turley frames the debate as a stark binary: Liberal vs. Conservative. However, a major University of California study on the politics of the professoriate found that a massive chunk of faculty members (upwards of 46%) actually identify as moderates or independents. They are apolitical, centrist professionals who do not participate in culture wars, completely dismantling the “hardened echo chamber” narrative.
Turley seems to be living in an academic bubble of his own making. Likely because he’s only catering to the MAGA crowd.
you KNOW you are LYING?
When you go to any northeast top college…they have safe space for EVERY Democrat BACKED HATE GROUP!
A top college president…told me…they would CONTINUE to accept based on RACE…even though it was OUTLAWED!
NO IVY league welcomes anything but FAR LEFT Democrats! You will be FIRED if you don’t parrot the LEFTIST TALKING POINTS
I HAVE SEEN IT!
“I have seen it!” is not the legal or scientific mic-drop you think it is. Your entire argument relies on ALL-CAPS rage and “trust me, bro” hearsay, which wouldn’t pass a freshman remedial logic class, let alone describe a multi-billion dollar academic ecosystem.
Trust me, X, –you would not “pass a freshman remedial logic class, let alone describe a multi-billion dollar academic ecosystem.” I doubt you could pass any class without the aid of AI, Google, and Wiki. Your entire world of knowledge is lifted from other sources from which you seek confirmation bias.
Having spent close thirty years in high education, I can tell you that Prof. Turley is 100% correct. If you would do a few minutes of research, you will find his numbers and the composition of so many departments is very, very, very left leaning. The interview and application questions are nauseating.
No one disputes that many university departments lean left. However, attributing that imbalance to an active administrative “purge” is a textbook example of confirmation bias. The data proves that the modern university faculty is shaped by a collapsing academic job market, shifting generational demographics, and the logical choices of conservative professionals who prefer lucrative private-sector careers over low-paying academic tracks.
The west coast became the dumping ground for the detritus of society. The flowers have all wilted and gone to ground.
The National Student Clearinghouse Research Center (NSCRC) tracking data reveals that public universities are struggling heavily to attract specific types of students, and private universities are taking severe hits.
Private Four-Year Nonprofits: Witnessed a sharp 1.6% drop in undergraduate enrollment, indicating that expensive, non-public institutions are struggling to justify their price tag to families.
Private For-Profits: Dropped by 2.0% in undergraduate counts.
Data compiled in early 2026 indicates that new international student enrollments in the U.S. plummeted by 17%, largely due to shifting global mobility patterns and tightening federal visa restrictions. This has had a devastating impact on large public research universities like the University of Oregon, which rely heavily on out-of-state and international tuition margins to subsidize operations.
The data shows that the students who are pursuing post-secondary education are choosing paths with a quicker, cheaper return on investment, leaving expensive university dormitories empty.
The NSCRC report noted that while 4-year bachelor programs saw a meager 0.9% increase, undergraduate certificate programs spiked by an overwhelming 28.3% since 2021. Isn’t that what conservatives have always promoted?
Students are increasingly choosing trade certificates, vocational credentials, and community college programs (+3.0%) over the traditional, multi-year residential university experience, leaving campus dorm housing underutilized.
This has nothing to do with wokeness. But that didn’t stop professor Turley from implying it without any real evidence to back it up. It’s just another MAGA morsel for griping about issues they barely understand.
While you correctly state the demographic obvious – there are fewer college age students.
Further there are fewer of those college age students going to college. The latter being the free market at work. The surplus of poorly educated college students has created a deficit of skilled people in other areas.
I did not see anything wrong with your data – EXCEPT your implication that the impacts of a shortage of students will be uniform.
All colleges are competing for a dwindling number of students.
The law of supply and demand at work.
Colleges have to work harder to attract the same quality students, or accept lower quality students.
Or not end up with students at all.
They have to work harder to appeal to students.
Contra your claim the impact on State Funded colleges and universities – All other things being equal is Positive – not negative. These institutions cost less and appeal to students (and parents) who are more than ever seeking to get the best value for rising educational costs.
NORMALLY this would have little impact on elite schools – and maybe it has not – I have not seen that Data yet.
The cream of the crop of schools should not have difficulty filling their dorms – but they WILL have to be less selective in their enrollment.
This makes the problems at each lower tier Worse and Worse.
If the Ivy’s have no problems filling their dorms – the 2nd tier will have fewer of the students who in the past could not get into the Ivy’s and so on down the line, until the schools at the bottom face bankruptcy.
Is Turley correct that UOO is facing a crisis because it is too woke ?
I do not have the UOO data – but if a public university is having trouble filling its dorms – it is likely Turley is correct.
Regardless, YOU have constantly told us – that this is what College Students want.
We are going to find out – declining enrollment is not a one year problem, this is the new normal.
You note the decline in student Visa’s – though why you think that particularly impacts research universities ?
The has a significant impact – particularly on the first and 2nd tier schools. These students typically are paying Full Freight – no government aide, not university aide. Frequently they are coming from wealthy and even middle class families in repressive countries whose parents are trying to keep them away from their countries where they might be in danger. Political activism of any kind is poorly tolerated in repressive regimes – woke or otherwise.
Regardless for all the complaints leveled here – and often by me of US college education – Much of Europe has long ago destroyed their once prestigious colleges – with a few exceptions where they have merely damaged them – like we have.
The result is over the past several decades more foreign students wanting to come to the US – and often staying. Contra the left – this is still an incredible country. No country 1/20th our size has greater freedom or a higher standard of living. The handful of countries that are doing better than the US have populations smaller than florida and standards of living and freedom that are lower.
With more scrutiny on student Visa’s even upper tier universities have fewer students paying full tuition.
It would not surprise me in the slightest that UOO was in financial trouble for being too woke.
But this demographic problem is just starting.
We will have to see whether Woke actually sells.
But I doubt it.
The “law of supply and demand” is absolutely at work, but the demand is shifting based on affordability, geography, and career utility. Framing UO’s long-term budget adjustments as a culture-war referendum ignores the fact that full-paying out-of-state students are being priced out by West Coast living costs, international pipelines are being squeezed by federal visa policies, and a generation of practical students is choosing trade certificates over massive student loans.
Been through this – top tier colleges at MOST need to be slightly less selective facing declining demographics. It is normally the bottom tier that goes bankrupt.
UOO is a top tier college that is in trouble.
All top tier colleges are having trouble. Even Turley’s school. It’s affecting all of them. A few exceptions still exists.
You asked about your lies and inaccuracies. Here is an interesting one. “ALL top tier….A FEW exceptions…
Do you know what you are talking about? NO!
“All top tier colleges are having trouble.”
That is false.
Keep goin. You’re getting close to your daily quota.
The Woke ship is NOT sinking darn it.
It is just not sinking.
Pay no attention to top tier woke colleges with declining enrollment.
Oberlin College – another Left Wing nut college has seen its acceptance rate increase by 8% in the past decade. That is not as Bad as UOO, but Oberlin was more selective to start – they accepted 1:4 in 2015, they are accepting more than 1:3 today.
Again fewer people are applying to Oberlin – but because they were highly selective to begin with, they still get enough applicants to fill their dorms.
Never mind withholding funding. Give the University of Oregon a real sanction, one with substance. Kick them out of the Big 10.
Sigh, Professor Turley sure knows how to spin a good story without proper context or real data. He seems to be a big fan of correlation equals causation ideas. Wow.
Higher education is currently falling off the long-predicted “demographic cliff”—a sharp decline in the college-aged population resulting from the drop in U.S. birth rates during the 2008 financial crisis.
Enrollment is dropping nationwide, regardless of a school’s political reputation. Furthermore, regional economic factors, inflation, and skyrocketing housing costs on the West Coast have heavily impacted out-of-state recruitment, which UO President Karl Scholz explicitly noted as the primary driver of tuition revenue losses. This has nothing to do with wokeness.
Turley writes that “some woke institutions have closed entirely,” framing closures as an ideological purging by the market. However, the exact same economic and demographic forces are forcing conservative, traditional, and faith-based colleges to cut budgets or shut down completely.
If “wokeness” were the sole driver of university collapse, common sense would dictate conservative and deeply traditional campuses would be thriving. Instead, they are closing at an unprecedented rate due to the same financial pressures and there are plenty of examples.
The King’s College (New York): A deeply conservative, Christian liberal arts college that collapsed and canceled all classes due to a severe financial crisis and plummeting enrollment, despite its explicit commitment to traditional values and free-market principles.
Birmingham-Southern College (Alabama): A historic, traditional institution in a deeply conservative state that officially shut down after failing to secure a state-funded loan lifeline to survive its operational deficit.
Fontbonne University (Missouri) & Lourdes University (Ohio): Traditional, faith-based institutions that have faced closure or massive, multi-million dollar structural budget deficits, forcing them to eliminate majors, cut faculty, and close residential halls.
Providence Christian College (California): A conservative Christian college that officially ceased operations, citing insurmountable financial challenges and an inability to maintain sustainable enrollment numbers.
If we use Turley’s correlation equals causation logic these conservatives schools are closing because they are also not diverse enough, they don’t have an adequate number of liberal faculty, right?
“Enrollment is dropping nationwide, regardless of a school’s political reputation.”
That is false.
“Sigh, Professor Turley sure knows how to spin a good story without proper context or real data. He seems to be a big fan of correlation equals causation ideas. Wow.”
I will agree that Turley has not provided the Data to back up his conclusion – though unproven is not the same as wrong.
YOU have not provided the data either.
The general decline in college age students does NOT mean the impact will be uniform.
The laws of supply and demand mean that students and parents get to be more selective.
As I noted GENERALLY the impact will be far worse at lower tier schools – all other things being equal.
But all other things are not equal. UOO is ranked in the top 100 of US colleges – the top 5%.
Those colleges should see little or no impact from a declining total number of college students.
“Enrollment is dropping nationwide, regardless of a school’s political reputation. ”
Absolutely FALSE.
It is a colleges reputation that gets it through hard times with little difficulty.
In a buyers market – buyers will tend to choose the best – the top schools.
“Furthermore, regional economic factors, inflation, and skyrocketing housing costs on the West Coast have heavily impacted out-of-state recruitment”
Again failed democrat policies. Californians are paying $2/gal more than I am for Gas – despite the fact that CA has both oil and refineries in state.
“which UO President Karl Scholz explicitly noted as the primary driver of tuition revenue losses.”
Yes, UOO would openly admit – we are screwed because we are too woke.
“Turley writes that “some woke institutions have closed entirely,” framing closures as an ideological purging by the market.”
Absolutely I would like to see the evidence of that – but unlike you I strongly suspect Turley is correct.
We ARE in the midst of not an ideological purge in the market – but an anti-ideological purge – this is not a giant Pro MAGA market swing, but a more gradual anti-Woke swing.
” However, the exact same economic and demographic forces are forcing conservative, traditional, and faith-based colleges to cut budgets or shut down completely.”
The same demographic factors do not have a uniform demographic impact.
With few exceptions so called faith based colleges are not top tier or even close.
It is NORMAL for those institutions at the bottom to experience an order of magnitude large impact from market shifts. A surplus of students will impact them POSITIVELY more than top tier schools.
A shortage will impact them negatively more.
Further – just as Turley has postulated pushback against Woke – Religion has been on decline for decades – especially among the young – though there is SMALL evidence of some resurgence.
“If “wokeness” were the sole driver of university collapse”
Of course it is not the sole driver.
Demographics is the primary driver.
Liberty University – you can not get much more conservative than that – is setting enrollement records.
BYU has increased enrollment by almost 10% in the past decade.
Notre Dame Enrollment is up 10% over the past decade and Notre Dame REMAINS one of the most selective schools in the country – admitting 11% of applicants.
Declining demographics mean good schools will likely not see a speed bump.
Bad schools will fail.
That will be true for conservative and for woke schools
But the fact that a top 5% school has declining enrollment means something besides Demographics and perceived quality of education is at work.
Please identify a single non woke top 5% college that is having enrolement problems ?
If you can’t – then you can not blame this on demographics.
John say,
“Please identify a single non woke top 5% college that is having enrollment problems? If you can’t – then you can not blame this on demographics.”
If by “top 5%” you mean elite, hyper-selective, non-woke institutions, look no further than the service academies of the United States Armed Forces (West Point, the Naval Academy, and the Air Force Academy).
By any admissions metric, the U.S. service academies are firmly in the top 5% of elite higher education, boasting acceptance rates below 10–12%. They are explicitly traditional, patriotic, and non-woke.
The Department of Defense has sounded alarms over a severe multi-year enrollment and application crisis at the academies, driven by a shrinking pool of qualified 18-year-olds, a declining propensity among Gen Z to choose institutional career paths, and the exact same macroeconomic demographic shifts. If elite, fiercely traditional institutions are facing historic application drops, the problem is structural, not political.
Your counter-examples actually prove the rule of market insulation rather than an anti-woke resurgence.
BYU is heavily subsidized by tithing from the LDS Church, allowing it to lock undergraduate tuition at an incredibly cheap $3,200 to $6,500 per semester. In a crushing economy, a highly discounted, top-tier degree backed by a captive global religious pipeline will always see record demand.
Liberty University is not an enrollment record-breaker on campus; it is a multi-billion-dollar online digital corporation where over 85% of its 140,000+ students are non-traditional adult learners taking low-cost remote classes. Its physical campus has been mostly flat for a decade.
Notre Dame has an 11% acceptance rate. As an elite top-20 brand backed by a multi-billion-dollar endowment, it has enough of an applicant surplus to remain immune to the demographic cliff indefinitely.
“. . . a severe multi-year enrollment and application crisis at the [military] academies . . .”
Where do you get that garbage?
Enrollment at all three Academies has been virtually the same over the last decade, and has not increased because of congressional caps on enrollment.
Then you concoct more garbage to satisfy your irrational conclusions:
“If elite, fiercely traditional institutions are facing historic application drops . . .”
Applications have, in fact, skyrocketed.
X you are just so smart! You know everything! You constantly correct Turley about the law and the Constitution. You know everything about construction. About real estate. About building codes. About college faculty. About admissions. About what people think. You are just so smart!
Knowing everything like X pretends means he knows nothing. He runs away from any serious argument, and when he copies AI responses, he is admitting his lack of knowledge.
Repeating the same refuted demographic argument does not make it any better.
Absolutely poorly managed colleges will fail under demographic stress.
Conservative or not.
Absolutely lower tier colleges will be under significant financial stress with declining demographics.
But UOO is NOT a bottom tier college. It is not a mid tier college – it is US News ranked in the top 10%. At the very worst it should have to be less selective about admissions and it will have no problems.
UOO’s acceptance rate has INCREASED by almost 10% over the past decade.
i.e. they are saying NO to fewer and fewer less qualified students in order to maintain their student body.
I note you refer to “freshmen enrollment” at the University of Oregon as “first-year enrollment.” Refusal to call freshmen as such is one key reason I quit supporting my alma mater, the University of North Carolina, and I encourage you to always use the word “freshmen” in your articles about colleges.
Several years back, I discovered this (about UNC) when I read a letter from the chancellor addressed to alumni, and THREE times, in one very short paragraph, he called freshmen “first-year students.” My first thought was, “Why didn’t the chancellor have an editor review his letter before sending it out? Surely that poor writing style would have been caught?” Then I started looking into it and discovered it had become official policy at UNC to NOT use the word “freshman” anymore (“they’re not all men!”), just as they had previously stopped allowing chairmen and chairwomen of departments to be call such, instead opting for “chairs”! Since then, I have enjoyed telling “student callers”–(i.e., beggars)–exactly why I will not contribute any longer, and I enjoy explaining to them why such usage is so offensive.
If you look at the prospects for jobs in some of the degrees that the colleges offer you may understand why some of the schools are facing enrolment problems. Women’s studies and the like do not have much of a demand these days. It used to be that people and businesses looked at the 4 year degree as a sign of a hard working stick to it knowledgeable person to hire. Not so any more with all the antics that are wildly reported in the press.
The nations demand for the trades is immense and the pay once you are trained is not that bad. A licensed plumber in my area makes $120.00/hour. Not bad for 5 years of training and work and work to get your license. Electricians are another one of the high demand jobs. When and while the project is under way you can stand back and see your work and be proud.
And yes I was a general contractor for 35+ years in residential historic restorations, remodels and additions, so I am prejudiced.
Well done, sir. Much respect. As a retired community college instructor, I often talked to my students about the value of the trades. One of my favorite students was a young man (who did quite well in my class where the drop-out/fail rate was frequently over 50%) who was training to be a welder. I have little doubt he was soon out-earning me and virtually all of his classmates. Great kid.
Some of us are just not meant for the corporate world via a 4 year college degree. I worked at a Red Cross Blood Center in the SF bay area for 6 years. When I left, I was the business manager only taking the classes I needed from the local community college. Then I got fed up with the supposed non profit and the corporate world and found construction on the west shore of Tahoe to be rewarding. Learned with the help of friends and doing it. Hard work is nothing to be ashamed of but to be celebrated for what you accomplished and the journey to accomplish it.
RCS,
A friend of ours is getting her AAS in nursing. Asked what was the difference between a AAS and a BS in nursing she said,
“About five cents an hour and an additional $30k or more in debt.”
My friend’s son is a welder and he is doing great.
I enjoy welding and literature. Molten steel is a metaphor for many of life’s seemingly impossible circumstances. The history of the attempts to control it into something useful is in the hand of every person who strikes an arc.
Why do these faculties not know what a shipyard knows? You don’t build what you’re making to traverse a becalmed duck pond. You build to stand up to blue water rogue waves.
On the other hand, Some universities have had explosive growth over the past 12 years. Purdue University had tremendous growth from 2014-2024 to the point of overwhelming the building plans for dorms and off campus housing as well as teaching facilities. So much so that the administration had to drop the admissions for 2026 by approx les than 1 % in oder to pause the growth while facilities caught up. Despite this pause the applications rose another 5% for another record. Main Campus in West Lafayette is approx 56,000 and statewide campuses are up to 108,000. Strong faculty, high level achievements, pruning lightly attended courses and tuition freeze for almost 10 years has made quite a difference. This has also led to a boom in High tech and other business and manufacturing in the surrounding area with marked population growth and a great deal of road building and Traffic. Strange what reasonable cost, moderation, and openness can result in.
Of course the state has grown by an estimated 200,000 (approx) since 2020. No ocean with beaches but then no hurricanes either.
“If we are to protect these bastions of free speech, legislatures will need to play a more active role in addressing the exclusion of both faculty candidates and speakers on public campuses.”
No…those colleges and universities are NOT bastions of free speech. They need to be destroyed….and the buildings bulldozed to the ground….and salt poured on top of the rubble. Terminate the employment of every person on the payroll and refuse them any employment in the new schools.
Then start over, fresh, and return to the traditional standards of free speech, diversity of thought, and tolerance for opposing views and those that hold them. Either one embraces the notion of fairness, equity of thought, and the core foundations of our freedom and concept of government and human rights….or be gone.
There can be no compromise.
When one deals with cancer…excising the tumor is part of the process otherwise it continues to destroy its host.
Click on the story about “Professor” Mireille Miller-Young and check out what passes as a professor these days as she was featured in their black feminist speaker series. This isn’t Mortimer Adler with his Classic Books series teaching young people how to thing by studying the greatest works of our civilization, this is a nasty, whining, coffee klatch of disgruntled mid-wits trying to have a struggle session in order to keep the gravy train rolling.
Want to know how to start life with a low paying job and a $400,000 debt? Get a major studying under nasty, dumb, whining women (or men) that will teach you nothing about how to succeed in life. Think you’re angry at 19, wait until you are 30 after having paid off about 5% of your loan. You will end up like Anonymous, highlighted above, making angry, ageist, classist insults at those of us that have reached a comfortable spot in our lives.
Come On Man – the WHOLE STATE is a Whack Job Asylum. If it Looks Like a Whack, It Sounds like a Whack, and it Quacks like a Whack, it’s probably a WHACK! Bah haha. The Loony Tune State is barreling towards DOOM LOOP and the University of Organ-Failure is the lab rat for what is coming.
George!, George are you out there? Can we get a quote? Did Turley lie about his opinion? Do you have proof that Turley is a liar and intentionally withholds info to make you look bad?
Yes.
Are you going to be able to prove me wrong?
No need to prove you wrong, you do it yourself every day.
What have I said that is factually incorrect today Hullbobby?
We can point to all the posts that proved you wrong, where you ran away. We can also point to your AI answers that contradicted your initial statement or turned out to be hallucinations. What is your choice?
S. Meyer, have I said anything that is factually incorrect on this topic?
Are you admitting you have been factually incorrect or lying on other topics?
Why don’t you take your posts to AI and ask it directly if any of your facts are slippery or incorrect? You have a well-deserved reputation for being a liar and ignorant.
“Yes.”
Then it is YOUR obligation to prove it.
“Are you going to be able to prove me wrong?”
I did.
You falsely presumed that the impact of a decline in the total number of college bound students impacts all colleges equally. It does not.
It impacts lower tier colleges far more than upper tier colleges.
Absolutely lots of poor colleges – many of them christian have failed.
LBC a small conservative “bible college” near me has a rising enrollment
US news does not even bother to rank them. They have a 95% acceptance rate. They are far from top tier, but they are doing fine – they are well managed.
Badly managed colleges come in all sizes and ideologies.
UOO is a top tier college – when a top tier college is struggling – the issue is NOT demographics.
John Say,
“You are falsely assuming that a decline in college-bound students impacts all colleges equally. It does not.”
You seem to be confusing a rhetorical point with a literal one. You actually agree with the core market data that I provided on another post; you are just splitting hairs over semantics.
We have watched academia morph into blatant intellectual corruption and dishonesty for the last sixty years. I remember the Vietnam era college campus. I was a student then. Professors went insanely left. Their pressure on the administrators forced the entire school to the hard left. Sixty years of leftist dominance, doctrine and classroom indoctrination has perfected the progressive, socialist product. Oregon is its own example. It screams dysfunction. It doesn’t strive to teach, it indoctrinates. It doesn’t train, it intimidates students into submission. It doesn’t open minds, it closes them. It’s goal is not to be a forum for ideas, but rather a factory for Group Think. Let it wither away. Let the place and the hideous malformation it has become be relegated to the dustbin of history. Let it be a museum of failure. An example of what not to be.
I was at university freshman year 1968. You are absolutely correct. After the Kent State incident, those tweed clothed faculty emerged in their hippy clothes and were given speeches all over campus encouraging the radicalization of the campus. Sit-ins, demonstrations, our University’s 1969 year book ended with a double page spread with a declaration that the student body was ON STRIKE , no final exams because that would interfere with the protests and the occupation of the administration building and other such idiotic manifestations of the spoiled brat boomer generation. I returned 6 years later for graduate school and my old profs were lamenting the enforced affirmative action protocols that required passing minority students even though no demonstrations of good grades were available – it was woke before its time…. It has gotten progressively (no pun intended) worse from there. Short of a fumigation of the faculty and staff of all prog ideologist, there is little hope at this point. As we older people age out, what we remembered of true education will be lost in the mist of progressive propaganda and these new generations will remain ignorant of their own ignorance.
I think a phone call to George and Alex Soros is in order.
University of Chicago is as woke as others. For sure in their hiring practices.
woke… because yo say so. Clearly you are a stuip_d person. Maybe not even a person, an idiot most likely.
Ranting again? At some point in your life, you’ll wish you had been more open to alternative opinions.
you are a liar!
Maybe the university could dip into the bank of NIL money Nike spends on the Ducks’ football program.
Oregon extreme Liberal/Woke policies as a State and University have ruined the state and university. No wonder their are parts of the state want to leave Oregon and join Idaho. Perhaps the University should seek funds from the financial backers of Antifa and other radical groups for a bail out.