Across the country this month, university campuses were captured by student protestors outraged over the war in Israel. Students barricaded themselves in buildings, built “camps” on university property, blocked other students from access to academic buildings, and proudly waved signs saying everything from “Death to America” to “Long Live the Intifada.”
Normal taxpayers were outraged. Many of the universities where the protests happened were public institutions. The private universities still benefit from federal grant dollars and federally subsidized student loans. President Biden even wants to pass the cost of many student loans onto the rest of us. Taxpayers, at best, were keeping the rotting universities afloat and in some cases funding the very indoctrination they saw on their televisions.
So how do we fix it all?
As a starting point, we need to eliminate the Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) programs at these universities that teach students the dangerous philosophies that led to the protests. I suspect that will not be enough, though. We also need to stop spending taxpayer money on college majors that do little more than brainwash students and instead focus on majors that actually prepare students for a productive life.
To reach that conclusion, I’ve drawn not only on my experience as State Auditor, where I’ve seen massive amounts of taxpayer dollars wasted, but also on my experience going to some of the schools where the most offensive protests occurred.
Let’s begin with DEI. Multiple states like Florida, Texas, and Oklahoma (but not Mississippi) have saved millions by shutting down DEI offices at their universities. When you look under the hood, DEI offices are often wasteful. For instance, at one Mississippi public university, my team found that there are over 20 DEI staffers in the DEI office. Their main accomplishments last year? Handing out a grant to fund social justice yoga for preschoolers, whatever that is, and forcing the school of engineering to sit through a training on microagressions (“microagressions,” by the way, are when someone does or says something small to make another person mad, like the grave sin of saying “Quiet down, you guys” if there are both men and women in the room).
We should not be spending money on this. The University of North Carolina’s board of trustees just shut down their DEI offices and moved the money to pay for more campus police to keep students safe. That’s a great example of a common sense move to actually improve the lives of college students.
We also need to start sending taxpayer money to majors that prepare students to live a productive life instead of giving money for every major a college chooses to have. Again, as an example, in Mississippi one of our gender studies programs teaches classes called things like “Gender and Zombies.” And kids are taking out debt and using taxpayer funds to learn this.
A recent study by the Foundation for Research for Equal Opportunity found that many majors that taxpayers fund are nearly useless for graduates. The graduates have trouble finding good jobs after getting their degrees. Meanwhile, the Foundation found that a chemical engineer from Mississippi State can expect to make more than $83,000 a year after graduation. It just makes sense to send money to universities for the high-value degrees and let the universities fund the low value degrees with their own private donations.
It’s time to get smart about our universities. We spend billions on them. We can choose to let them devolve into ideological cesspools, or we can turn them into efficient, effective growth engines for our economies—places that produce the thinkers and workers our society needs.
Shad White is the 42nd state auditor of Mississippi
