Why Youngstown State matters more than Harvard | Will Bunch Newsletter

They say that all good things must come to an end. In an unrelated matter, 2023 is winding down and this is (essentially) my last writing of this annus horribilis. It wraps up with babies dying in a senseless war, America on the brink of dictatorship and — I’d say something about my sports teams but it would sound way too trite. The good news? It’s not 2024 ... yet.

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There’s a lot of issues that Republicans on Capitol Hill seem anxious to avoid — stopping Vladimir Putin’s Russia in Ukraine, or even just funding the government — but they sure have strong opinions about who should be running the nation’s colleges and universities.

This especially seems true for America’s elite private schools like Harvard, MIT, and Penn, whose leaders were summoned to D.C. for a House hearing and flunked the pop quiz that GOPers like New York Rep. Elise Stefanik drew up for them, and as a result were urged to quit their prestigious jobs. “One down. Two to go,” Stefanik crowed on X/Twitter after Penn’s president Liz Magill resigned earlier this month.

And yet we never hear about the other side of the coin. Because while Republicans get big headlines for attacking what they call “wokeness” at the ivy-drenched academies that heavily school the children of the rich and powerful, their functionaries are busy installing conservative political hacks and hedge funders to lead universities that educate far more people.

Can we please stop talking about Harvard for a moment and have a conversation about Youngstown State?

It’s not just that the Ohio public university — in the heart of the Mahoning Valley, a rust belt of dead factories near the Pennsylvania border — educates more of America’s children (8,673 undergrads) than the Massachusetts-based Ivy League flagship (7,240), or that those kids probably rack up more debt than their peers at Harvard, which has more generous financial aid. It’s that the middle-class offspring of Middle America are the ones most in need of what college has to offer.

No wonder faculty, alumni, and students were outraged when the nine trustees of Youngstown State — named by Republican governors in this increasingly red state — bypassed the normal search process to shock the campus with its new president, a Tea Party-era right-wing Republican congressman named Bill Johnson.

It’s not just that Johnson was a military man before his 2010 election to Congress and has zero experience in academia, let alone running a large university. Many in the Youngstown State community are outraged that an institution supposedly dedicated to the pursuit of truth will be led by a politician who less than three years ago signed onto the Big Lie, voting with dozens of other GOP lawmakers in their failed effort to block President Joe Biden’s 2020 victory.

“Johnson’s horrific record of insurrectionist and anti-democratic action, hostility towards minorities, and denial of basic climate science are in stark opposition to the principles of public education,” stated a call for campus protest by a newly formed group called Community Concerned for the Future of YSU, referring also to Johnson’s votes against climate action and LGBTQ rights.

But what took place at Youngstown State didn’t happen in a vacuum. Days later, America’s oldest public university and one of its most prestigious, the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, announced its interim leader to replace the outgoing president, Kevin Guskiewicz. Guskiewicz likely left his position because of political interference from Chapel Hill’s almost-all-Republican trustees.

The new guy probably won’t be complaining. Lee Roberts (son of the late journalist Cokie Roberts) — who’d been one of those trustees — was the former state budget chief for North Carolina’s last, reactionary Republican governor, and has spent the rest of his career in high finance. He’s taught a financial course at his nearby alma mater Duke but — stop me if you’ve heard this before — has no substantive experience running a large university.

It was all too much for Nikole Hannah-Jones, Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist behind The 1619 Project who has her own tortured history with UNC, where those same right-leaning trustees killed a tenure deal for Hannah-Jones to teach there in 2021. She compared Roberts’ interim hiring to the GOP’s failed push to pressure Harvard to force out its first Black president, Claudine Gay, writing that “I’ve just watched for days as people claimed an actual academic with administrative experience, peer-reviewed papers and a PhD was called unqualified and accused of only getting hired because if her race. Where are y’all now? What do you call THIS.”

But THIS is nothing new in Florida, where during the tenure of GOP Gov. Ron DeSantis, the flagging White House hopeful, former U.S. senator from Nebraska Ben Sasse got the nod as president of the flagship University of Florida. On top of that, DeSantis’ push to crush the quirky and diverse New College of Florida is spearheaded by a former Florida GOP lawmaker named Richard Corcoran, who almost immediately doubled his annual paycheck to $700,000, plus perks.

No doubt, patronage and plunder are one reason for the GOP political-hack takeover of red-state universities, but there’s a much bigger game afoot. Lawmakers like Stefanik revel in taking on Harvard or Penn because they see those schools as producing future leaders that are more tolerant, diverse, and liberal-minded, and because it generates headlines (not to mention Stefanik’s personal grudge against her alma mater).

But only 0.4% of U.S. undergrads attend the eight Ivy League schools, while public, 4-year schools like UNC or Youngstown State educate nearly half (48%). Controlling those campuses — curbing their diversity initiatives and downsizing the liberal arts that promote critical thinking while pumping up pro-capitalism business or STEM courses — helps their real agenda, which is molding young people less likely to challenge their authority. We lose that war when they capture Youngstown State while folks are too busy defending Harvard.

Question: How can journalists and media personalities ‘speak truth to power’ with Pres. Biden (and allies), criticizing him when warranted, without turning voters against him and democracy at a time when the alternative will be catastrophic? Via TheseKeystrokesKillFascists (@Agt00Soul) on X/Twitter

Answer: This is such an important point. For me, as an opinion journalist who’s open about holding liberal values, I think it’s vitally important to criticize conservatives for the bad things they believe — from gross inequality to opposing basic rights for those not in a privileged white patriarchy — but just as aggressively to go after liberals who don’t fight for the good things they claim to support. In the case of Biden, he can’t succeed unless progressive folks are in his face constantly, to force him to keep his promises on immigration, climate, student debt, and more. You can’t save democracy if you censor yourself from fighting for the things you believe in.

Last week’s question about coming up with a political strategy to stop Donald Trump’s relentless rise in the polls produced a strong consensus, which I also agree with, that the only way for Democrats to win in 2024 is a relentless focus on energizing the party’s base to actually vote. Stephen R. Rourke urged Dems “to do everything possible to outnumber Trump voters at the polls. Trump voters aren’t people who can be reasoned or bargained with. Their hero is a con artist ...” Added Mary Ann Petro: “It’s the independents and those for whom personal rights such as reproductive rights are a primary concern.”

📮This week’s question: The dreaded 2024 is finally here. Who are you expecting to win in November, Biden or Trump, and why? For a chance to be featured in my newsletter, email me your answer. Please write “2024 election” in the subject line.

Although 2024 begins with an intense focus on the presidential race, a major subplot will be the GOP‘s efforts to take back the U.S. Senate so that a would-be Trump 47 can confirm his extremist cabinet nominees, judges, etc. Yet again, that road runs right through Pennsylvania. But a political observer can’t help but wonder why the GOP thinks it can oust fairly popular Democratic Sen. Bob Casey with the insanity of trying the same thing — hedge-fund multi-millionaire Dave McCormick, late of Connecticut and unable to even beat Mehmet Oz in a 2022 Republican primary — and expecting a different result.

It’s off to a disastrous start. For example, this weekend McCormick was photographed eating lobster tails near Boston at the Patriots-Chiefs game with world’s richest man Elon Musk — not a good way to convince Pennsylvanians you’re not an out-of-touch New Englander. In a tweet, McCormick urged Pa. lawmakers to go beyond their recent assault on Penn Vet to slash all other state funding for the University of Pennsylvania, apparently unaware there is none. Even on the more substantive issues, McCormick is struggling to create a rationale for running.

Earlier this month, McCormick staged a Philadelphia event to roll out proposals to show voters that getting tough on China will be a cornerstone of his campaign. But it seemed more an effort to inoculate the GOP Senate candidate against the likely attack ads that his former firm, Bridgewater, invested more than $1.7 billion in China while he was CEO, while McCormick had even declared during a stint in the George W. Bush administration, “When China succeeds, the United States succeeds.” His new “get-tough” ideas — like stopping Chinese imports of fentanyl ingredients or making America less reliant on their solar panels — are already issues that Casey has a track record of working on. McCormick better hope that Trump has coattails he can cling to, because voters here aren’t shopping for an empty down vest.

“Esther Gordon, a 65-year-old retired French teacher who lives in Newtown Square, will never forget that feeling when she woke up on November 9 and it sunk in that Donald Trump had really won the presidential election. She said it felt like somebody had died.” That was the dark vibe nearly six weeks later, on Dec. 19, 2016. Yet it was impossible not to notice that a resistance was already brewing, and that a majority of the resisters were women, many who had not been politically active before Trump became president-elect. With a massive Women’s March on the calendar, you could smell a kind of revolution — even if we didn’t know the #MeToo movement was coming next. Check out the zeitgeist of seven years ago: “The ‘good girls revolt’ is the untold political story of 2017.”

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