Stop the Coming Civil War: My Savage Truth

by Michael Savage

  The number of high school students enrolling in colleges has increased by 47 percent since 1970, with 25 percent of the increase occurring between 2000 and 2008. During roughly the same time, tuition costs at four-year public colleges and universities rose by nearly 250 percent, while the median U.S. family income has dropped by more than 14 percent.13

  Colleges have padded their faculties and staffs enormously as the education bubble has developed. Layer upon layer of management has been added.14 It won’t be long until some university will create a position called Dean of Deans.

  A few years back, the University of Minnesota created a department called the Office of Equity and Diversity. According to a Wall Street Journal investigation, that department has ten people with the word director in their title. The school employs 353 people who make over $200,000 a year.15

  This ugly and inefficient trend is made much worse by the introduction of hundreds of new pseudo-academic disciplines in response to the growing division of the U.S. population into groups—based on such characteristics as gender, race, and income—that political leftists have brought about.16 University coursework is overloaded with classes weighted heavily toward such soft disciplines as Conflict Resolution and Peace Studies, which can be molded to comply with their professors’ political biases. Here are some of the more enlightened subjects that are being offered at our major universities today:

  • GaGa for Gaga: Sex, Gender and Identity (University of Virginia)

  • Philosophy and Star Trek (Georgetown University)

  • God, Sex, Chocolate: Desire and the Spiritual Path (UC San Diego)

  • The Feminist Critique of Christianity (University of Pennsylvania)

  • What if Harry Potter Is Real? (Appalachian State University)17

  If you’re an English major, you very likely no longer study the writings of Geoffrey Chaucer, William Shakespeare, and John Milton. Those requirements are gone. Now, if you choose to major in English, in many universities you’ll have to take at least three “literature” courses in one or more of the following disciplines: Gender, Race, Ethnicity, Disability, and Sexuality Studies; Imperial, Transnational, and Postcolonial Studies; Interdisciplinary Studies; or Critical Theory. The substance of courses in these disciplines is left up the professor’s interpretation.18

  There was a time when free speech was a fight that the left viewed as strictly theirs. But now on college campuses across the country, it is the conservative voice that struggles to be heard. Look no further than commencement addresses and whom the elite schools pick to deliver them. In 2012, out of the top fifty liberal arts colleges, only one asked a conservative, Governor Bob McDonnell from Virginia, to give a commencement speech. McDonnell spoke at the University of Richmond. Not a single conservative was asked to speak outside of his home state.19

  As I see it, college textbook publishing has degenerated into something akin to a racket that is trying desperately to maintain its stranglehold on the extended-adolescence market that brick-and-mortar institutions of higher education have helped create.20 According to a survey conducted by a public interest research group, textbooks cost college students over $1,200 a year on average, with the cost of many individual books soaring to $200 and higher. What’s more, new editions, usually with little additional material, are published every two or three years. This effectively limits the market for used textbooks. The cost of textbooks is so prohibitive that students regularly decide their course schedule not on their hopes and dreams but on how much the books for the course will cost.21

  Beyond that, American colleges foster the physical separation of people into racial, ethnic, and cultural groups, a purposeful result, I believe, of the president’s agenda. As I see it, his plan is to drive wedges between us based on characteristics that include race, and college campuses are a perfect staging ground for this.

  Let me give you some examples.

  At many universities, blacks are offered the option of living in all-black dormitories or on all-black floors within dormitories. Even where colleges don’t offer segregated housing, students often self-segregate. It’s gotten so serious at the University of Massachusetts that the school claims it is trying to end the practice:

  The self-segregation has become so entrenched that one residential area on campus preferred by Asian students is known as “Chinatown.” A residential cluster where many black students choose to live is commonly referred to on campus as “The Projects.”… The university said that it plans to discourage students from self-segregating with the rooming choices, but it is unclear at this time how this will be accomplished.22

  Bubble.edu

  As I’ve mentioned, the education bubble that is reflected in the radical increase in tuition and other expenses is made possible by the same thing that led to the housing bubble: an increase in debt offered to people who don’t have the means to pay it back, along with a takeover of the student loan industry by the federal government.

  Total student loan debt, which has reached more than $1 trillion, now exceeds credit card debt in the United States.23 In the wake of this, 33 percent of all “subprime student loans” are more than ninety days overdue. Before the crash of 2008, that number was 24 percent.24

  With the Obama administration no longer requiring repayment of unpaid student loans—why not let the American taxpayer shoulder the burden for student debt like they do for pretty much all other U.S. debt?—we face another financial catastrophe. And this one will contribute significantly to the radical takeover of America. This is fully in keeping with Obama’s intent to cause most Americans to become dependent on the federal government for the needs of their lives. This, in turn, exacerbates the possibility of the coming civil war in our country.

  As the federal government commandeers the student loan business and college tuition rates soar, many students graduate with debt beyond their ability to pay. That’s largely due to the fact that the current administration’s economic policy has driven most of the jobs that were traditionally filled by college graduates out of the country.

  Already at a disadvantage because they’ve spent their time in school parroting leftist platitudes rather than thinking for themselves, graduates are now forced to compete for minimum-wage jobs for which they’re overqualified. In the process, they continue to live with their parents because they can’t afford a place of their own. By the way: Thank you, Mr. President, for raising the federal minimum wage to $10.10 an hour. At that rate, college grads may be able to pay back the school loans they owe by the time they’re eligible for Social Security—if Social Security is still around by then.

  Here’s how I see it: The brick-and-mortar universities, which were once the cornerstones of free speech and educational inquiry, have become debt-ridden gulags of biased, agenda-driven indoctrination.

  The indoctrination of students begins early in the American educational system.

  One of the reasons is Common Core.

  In 2010, a set of standards that had been developed by a committee selected by state governors was released. It prescribes for educators what students should learn at each grade level, K through 12.25 Education Secretary Arne Duncan—who formerly headed up the Chicago school system that was a pioneer in destroying American education during the late twentieth century—provided incentives for states to adopt the standards by promising Race to the Top grants to those who did.

  What emerged was another program that solidified the political left’s hold on progressive education in the United States.

  Common Core is designed and implemented by vacuous and unseeing leftist functionaries. It’s full of educational bureaucratic language that even most educators can’t understand. Many call it “Corespeak.”

  How about having your children’s education designed, not on principles of learning important skills and absorbing information that will help them succeed in the real world, but on leftist “values” embedded in language that includes words such as globalism, empathy, benchmarks, automaticit
y, collaborative partner, rigor, relevancy, and relationship.

  The stewards of Corespeak are banking on parents and students being too embarrassed to ask to have the terms explained to them. As one commentator put it, “You don’t want to be ‘that parent’ who asks, ‘What are they talking about?’ And they know it.”26

  So why would educators come up with a whole new language that confuses those they’re supposed to be serving? It’s as simple as it is subversive: Baffle parents and students with words that cover their inadequacy, criminality, and the advancement of their leftist agenda. Remember Bill Clinton’s “It depends on what the meaning of is is”?

  What do those committed to real education think about Common Core?

  A Hillsdale College professor slams Common Core’s dictum to eliminate the study of classic literature and replace it with “informational” books that are nothing more than communist manifestos. He singles out textbook publisher Prentice Hall for creating “clearly ideological” books for use in America’s schools.

  Describing Common Core, which recommends teaching politically driven non-subjects like global warming, as “superficial, biased, and embarrassingly dumb,” he comes to this conclusion:

  Either there exists no coherent philosophy of education governing the arrangement of texts within the document, or there does exist a coherent philosophy: that of obscuring the high, powerful truths about virtue, freedom, suffering, and happiness found in great works of Western literature.27

  So how can we fight back?

  One way is through the funding of school vouchers that enable parents to choose the schools their children attend according to the quality of the education they receive and not where they live.

  Let me expand on the subject of Louisiana’s charter schools.

  Louisiana governor Bobby Jindal has promoted the use of educational vouchers, and Louisiana schools after Hurricane Katrina have made a remarkable turnaround in the quality of education they provide for their students and the educational outcomes their students achieve. It is a phenomenon that frightens the wits out of the Obama administration. So much so that the president dispatched Attorney General Eric Holder to intervene in Louisiana’s promotion of educational success.

  Holder’s Justice Department filed a lawsuit to block the school voucher program in twenty-two Louisiana school districts.

  Because the Louisiana voucher law limits vouchers to families with incomes below five times the poverty level whose children attend schools that fail to meet federal standards, black children are overwhelmingly the beneficiaries of the program.

  Nearly seven thousand students received school vouchers in Louisiana, and 83 percent of them were black.

  In other words, Holder is essentially making a race-based case against black students being able to get a quality education. Do you know what Holder’s reasoning was on this? The voucher program might lead to a return of segregation by leaving many of the state’s schools with too many white students.28

  “We’ve got Eric Holder and the Department of Justice trying to stand in the schoolhouse door to prevent minority kids, low-income kids, kids who haven’t had access to a great education the chance to go to better schools,” said Jindal.29

  Governor Jindal chose those words carefully and wisely. The “schoolhouse door” reference evokes the South of the 1960s and Governor George Wallace trying to block black students from integrating the University of Alabama.

  We have a black attorney general doing the same thing.

  Let me ask you, How could that be?

  How could we have the top law enforcement officer in the country, an African-American, trying to sabotage a successful educational program that primarily benefits African-American children?

  How can that happen unless bigger forces are at play?

  Except for the run-up to the Civil War, the rhetoric for secession was never louder than it was in George Wallace’s time. The division in our country was never angrier, although right now it’s a close second.

  And nowhere are anger and distrust more easily provoked than when the education and the fate of our children are at stake.

  What I see as Holder’s war against the schoolchildren of Louisiana is part of a calculated timetable. And the clock is ticking.

  At the same time Holder is making a race-based argument against black children in Louisiana schools, he’s complaining about what he sees as another racist conspiracy in America, this one in our preschools.

  Holder’s issue? Black children are singled out for discipline more frequently than their white counterparts. While black kids make up only 18 percent of America’s preschool population, nearly half of black preschoolers were suspended more than once.30

  This new issue has already generated a response. Education Secretary Arne Duncan has set forth a framework of what he calls educational equality of outcome. New York City has its own version of the national Dignity in Schools Campaign. The framework calls for keeping students who disrupt classes in the classroom. According to this plan, minority students are unfairly targeted when they’re disruptive. Notice that it’s not the disruption that is the focus of the plan, but the targeting of the unruly and sometimes violent students.

  It’s called “disparate impact,” and it’s one of the guiding principles of Eric Holder’s tenure as attorney general.

  It doesn’t matter what they do in the classroom. The only thing that matters is that they’re impacted “disparately” for their behavior. Make the other students and the teachers suffer because of bad student behavior, but don’t deal with the behavior itself.31

  Under the principle of disparate impact, teachers and administrators risk being branded as racists if they lodge a complaint against a minority student. The disparate impact principle also discourages schools from calling the police, even when behavior threatens the safety of students and teachers.

  The disparate impact rule is the guiding principle in Eric Holder’s denying Louisiana students a good education. Of course, Holder’s real intent has nothing to do with the welfare of disadvantaged students trapped in the leftist educational ghetto that the public schools have become. It has everything to do with the current administration’s further centralizing control of an already centralized and ideologically corrupt education system in the United States.

  The Justice Department is demanding that the federal government has the final say on whether or not students get vouchers and, if they do, who gets them.

  Holder is eying more than just control over the twenty-two school districts in question. He’s determined to take over the entire state of Louisiana’s voucher program. In doing this, he would also gain control over the state’s private schools. And do you really think he’ll stop at the Louisiana border?

  Let me give you an idea of how seditious Obama is when it comes to education. Just before he was reelected, his Education Department instituted something called Race to the Top. Obama dangled $4.3 billion in stimulus funds in front of governors to prod them into enrolling their states in this federally run contest. Ostensibly, the states posting the highest testing scores would get the biggest parts of the cash. Now, you have to understand, these governors were desperate for school funding. So they didn’t bother to look at the price that their states would have to pay for money that came out of the pockets of regular Americans anyhow.

  They didn’t know they were signing on for a nationalized core curriculum.

  They didn’t know they were turning over local control of schools to federal bureaucrats.

  They didn’t know they were agreeing to a lower national standard.

  They didn’t know that their education funds would be redistributed.

  They didn’t know that the option of private schools and home schooling would be taken away.

  It was bait-and-switch in the most destructive sense of that phrase. And governors across the nation fell for it, hook, line, and sinker.

  The hopes and dreams of millions of American children now res
t in the president’s hands. Out of all the power grabs this administration has perpetrated, this is perhaps the most sinister.

  Our president’s plan for a complete and merciless takeover of education was in the works even before he ran for president. And the plotting of it involved the usual Chicago suspects.

  In the late 1990s and early 2000s, Obama was the chairman of Chicago Annenberg Challenge (CAC). Purportedly an education foundation formed to improve Chicago’s public schools and founded by none other than bomb thrower Bill Ayers, the CAC was a strong-armed front that raised hundreds of millions of dollars and funneled the cash to organizations like the South Shore African Village Collaborative, the Dual Language Exchange, and ACORN.32

  CAC in Chicago was a microcosm of a bigger plan and sowed the seeds for the president’s nationalized education agenda. Just like the plan this administration has in the works for the nation, in Chicago education “wealth” was redistributed, local control was abolished, and private schooling defunded. In spite of the millions raised by CAC, testing scores remained stagnant and would soon plummet. Much of this came on the watch of Arne Duncan, who was CEO of the Chicago public school system at the time.

  The government takeover of education is best illustrated by what’s happening in a tiny minority school district in Marin County. The single school in the Sausalito district has only about 150 students. Because it’s known as a “basic aid district,” one which gets an inordinate amount of property tax money to fund it, the district spends about $30,000 per student every year. That amount of money will buy you a year at a good university. It’s more than three times the $9,000 spent per student in the average California school district.33 Even so, owing to grotesque administrative salaries, school board “expenses,” and patronage teaching positions under the guise of aiding “minority” students, they can’t make ends meet.

  Can you say “disparate impact”?