If you are conservative, your complaints about the country almost certainly include two things: the continued growth of the government bureaucracy and the leftward tilt of so many college faculties.
Megan McArdle, a columnist on The Washington Post website, says conservatives should apply a recent success story that, over time, would greatly level both playing fields.
She contends, with justification, that conservatives, and especially Republicans, have failed to offer alternatives to important issues. It’s as if the philosophy is, “Obamacare bad, government bad, college faculties bad,” but no one is willing to take the next logical step and propose how to change things for the better.
But McArdle said the template for change already exists: former President Trump’s successful effort to create a rightward shift in the federal judiciary.
“Notice that Republicans did not win this victory by passing laws forbidding judges to be liberal,” she wrote. “Instead, they spent decades building out conservative theories of jurisprudence and networks of scholars trained in those methods who could be appointed or elected to the bench.
“They should be replicating that model in every discipline that produces a lot of government workers or political appointees — the equivalent of a Federalist Society chapter at every school of education, social work, public health or public policy in the country.”
A second task, she believes, is to work against “the credentialism and occupational licensing regimes that have turned colleges into gatekeepers to most of the good jobs.”
Conservatives could look at eliminating college degree or licensing requirements for certain jobs. “These requirements are gifts to universities, but they are also barriers to mobility for people who don’t want, or aren’t able, to spend years sitting in a classroom,” McArdle added.
Maryland, in fact, is already doing this: its Republican governor has led an effort to remove college degree requirements from hundreds of state government jobs.
This is certain to provoke educational resistance, but the reply should be that a four-year degree is now ridiculously expensive at too many schools, and institutions that regularly raise their tuition by 3% to 5% a year have abused their pricing capabilities.
The long-term goal, as McArdle noted, is to get more of a philosophical balance into government employment and college faculties. Both skew to the left because conservatives abandoned government jobs and education.
But she warned, “Unless these policies are implemented by competent civil servants who agree with your agenda, managers will likely still default to hiring the candidate with the college degree.
“Which is why, for all their quarrels with academia, conservatives can’t afford to turn their back on it; they need the personnel in the trenches to make their vision a reality.”
— Jack Ryan, McComb Enterprise-Journal
