COLUMN: The miseducation of Rick Santorum
Among presidential candidate Rick Santorum’s postgraduate degrees is a J.D. from the Dickinson School of Law.
Despite his own education, Santorum recently took aim at American universities in a speech to Americans for Prosperity in Troy, saying, “President Obama once said he wants everybody in America to go to college. What a snob ... Oh, I understand why he wants you to go to college. He wants to remake you in his image.”
This is more than the pot calling the kettle elitist; it’s disingenuous and insulting. Each of the remaining Republican candidates earned advanced degrees. Like most American parents, they want their children to do the same.
Santorum is correct about one thing: The president has been a most vocal supporter of higher education. He understands higher education’s indispensable role in today’s economy.
Obama responded to Santorum on Monday, saying, “When I speak about higher education, we’re not just talking about a four-year degree. We’re talking about somebody going to a community college and getting trained for that manufacturing job that now is requiring somebody walking through the door, handling a million-dollar piece of equipment.”
Anti-academicism in its various forms is standard red-meat in today’s mainstream conservative discourse. In truth, pursuing an education from any postsecondary institution has nothing to do with political ideology. Only in the rhetoric of conservative victimhood is a liberal viewpoint the exclusive domain of higher education.
There are plenty of active conservative students, professors and organizations at universities nationwide. Just last weekend, our own Campus Conservatives group did the commendable work of bringing Ron Paul to campus.
Higher education has everything to do with gaining intellectual fulfillment, skills and economic advantage. For these reasons, thousands of American families struggle tirelessly to afford the skyrocketing costs of higher education.
Santorum’s comments are an outright insult to working families, who deserve better than to be told they are working merely to send their children to institutions of liberal indoctrination.
Meanwhile, the president seeks to help those families better themselves, and in turn the nation’s economy. Recently, in a speech to the University of Michigan in January, he outlined a plan to increase federal Perkins loan funding by $7 billion.
Many students depend on the Perkins loan’s favorable interest rates. Obama’s plan would more than double the number of institutions at which Perkins loans are available, from 1,700 to 4,000.
In the same speech, the president also unveiled a plan to correlate federal aid to universities based on the affordability of each institution’s tuition.
Republicans will no doubt decry this plan as price controlling. Few, however, will stoop as low in their criticism of the education system and its participants as Santorum.
