Who Cares about the Goddamn Ivy League?
By 
As CNN and the New York Times eat out of Chris Rufo’s lap and move toward getting the president of Harvard fired for not throwing out students who care about genocide in Gaza, the vast majority of American students are at workaday institutions trying to improve their lives and no one in the media ever talks about these places because they just don’t care about everyday college students. Will Bunch has a good piece on this, thinking about Youngstown State University. Granted YSU did not exactly cover itself in glory when it hired former Ohio State football coach Jim Tressel as its president, but still no one said smaller schools are run as anything other than grift mills for administrators. And things are really bad at schools like this because Republican politicians are hiring right-wing hacks to be their operators to destroy the world’s greatest system of higher education. But no one wants to talk about this because it doesn’t fill Bari Weiss’ agenda.
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.
Like, these are the actual terrible things that are happening in American higher education! Maybe talk about them!
I would like to suggest a rule of journalism that I am sure I have articulated before. For every story in a major newspaper about Harvard, there needs to be one about Framingham State. For every story in a major newspaper about Yale, there needs to be one about Southern Connecticut State. And so on. Because the American media’s coverage of higher education is an absolute travesty.