Dominican University, in San Rafael, California, is in trouble. Because of serious financial problems, it may lose its accreditation in the Western Association of Schools and Colleges. The university president, Nicola Pitchford, knows who’s to blame: Trump. However, a stroll through the college website explains that Trump is just responding to Normal Americans who are sick of the garbage these institutions peddle.
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You can read about the university’s financial travails in the Marin IJ. The gist is that it’s running out of money, especially since there are ever fewer students. That’s actually pretty funny when you consider that it was academia that sowed the seeds of its own destruction by denigrating motherhood for decades, elevating abortion to a sacrament, and telling students that having babies means populating the Earth with destructive parasites.
But this essay is about something different. The college president didn’t talk about demographic reality. She had just one scapegoat:
“It’s the rhetoric from the Department of Education — and elsewhere in the federal administration — suggesting that higher education has not been a responsible steward of federal dollars and needs therefore to be on a tighter leash.”
She noted an “unprecedented hostility” toward higher education at the federal level.
“There’s a real kind of existential pressure on our accrediting bodies,” Pitchford said. “It’s a hostile and challenging climate for all colleges and universities — even Harvard, the University of Chicago and other elite universities are cutting budgets and laying off personnel.”
She’s wrong. The administration, from Trump down, is not hostile to actual education. Instead, it reflects the American public’s disgust with having its tax dollars sent to what passes for education, but is, instead, a combination of leftist indoctrination and foolish garbage.
If you want to be an undergraduate at Dominican, it will cost you $71,658 to $76,762 annually. No wonder 99% of its incoming students receive financial aid, at least some of which you pay for. Around 67% of its students have received student loans. (Almost one-fifth of student-loan debtors nationwide default on their loans.) In addition, Dominican has received several million in state and federal grants over the last few years.
While Dominican has a religious gloss (it was founded by nuns in 1890), it’s as leftist as most other college campuses. Its “Community and Belonging” page, with its picture of mostly minority women wearing masks, has a “Land Acknowledgment Statement,” although, notably, it hasn’t given back its stolen land. Still, the campus does not observe Columbus Day, replacing it with a celebration of “Indigenous Peoples’ Day.
Dominican boasts that its Diversity Action Group “is a standing committee of faculty, staff, administration, and students charged with the mission of advocating for, and creating a diversity sensitive institutional environment at Dominican for all stakeholders.” The group’s members all have pronouns.
In 2023, the university boasted that, over a two-year period, “90 faculty and staff have participated in Dominican University of California’s ‘Safe Zone’ training… serve as role models for inclusivity” for all things LGBTQ.
You can get a Social Justice degree at Dominican. And in 2020, the faculty was all in on a pro-CRT strike that swept the nation.
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And then there are the classes. The course catalog lists classes that sound traditional, although there’s no telling what’s actually being taught. For example, there is a Shakespeare class in the English department, and it may really teach Shakespeare without a DEI gloss, although I doubt it. In the same way, the biology classes sound traditional, but they’re probably teaching “transgender” theory.
But a lot of the classes are purely leftist. In Education, future teachers of America learn “Differentiating Instruction for Inclusive Classrooms,” “Explorations in Equity,” and “Teaching for Equity.”
The English Department offers “Advanced Writing & Research: Queer Literature & Film” and “Advanced Writing & Research: Feminist Crip Ethics.” The full description for this core class is worth reading:
This course examines nineteenth to twenty-first century American literature that prompts debate about ethical issues regarding gender and disability. Applying a feminist methodology that includes intersectional analysis and an ethics of care, students will analyze narrative plots to form ethical arguments regarding sexism and ableism.
Oh, and there’s this core class—“Advanced Writing & Research: Postcolonialism”:
Study of literature produced by cultures that developed in response to colonial domination, using the theoretical frameworks of postcolonial, decolonial, and anti-colonial thinkers. Introduces students to “Third Worldist” thinking agross [sic] the Global South, including the work of Edward Said [an arch antisemite], Gayatri Spivak, Eduoard Glissant, Sylvia Wynter, Aime Cesaire, Djamila Ribeiro, Walter Mignolo, Marisol De La Cadena, and Rita Segato.
You can also study “Feminist Disability Ethics in Literature,” which uses the same language as that describing Feminist Crip Ethics. There are also classes in “Latinx Literatures” (which includes reading about “the intersection of disability and poetry, and queer Chicanx literature in the US”) and “Queer Lives.”
Step out of English Department and you find a humanities class that studies “Politics of the Body in Motion” (don’t ask; I couldn’t figure it out), and history classes that attack Bugs Bunny and Mickey Mouse for supporting America during WWII, obsess about “ethnicity and race” in America, and waste taxpayer and student dollars to teach mindless courses such as “Video Games as History.” In the religion department at this once Catholic college, you can learn about “Dance and Spiritual Expression.”
The catalog is an endless flow of leftist garbage that reflects the faculty’s narrow worldview, self-obsession, ego issues and, above all, hatred for America—and all for around $75,000 a year.
Americans are sick of this. They don’t want to support this parody of education anymore. They don’t want their children to come home confused about their sexuality, self-loathing, lazy, entitled, and hating their country.
It’s not the Trump administration that’s hostile to higher education. It’s that higher education is a joke, and Americans are no longer laughing, nor are they willing to pay the price of admission.
Dominican University of California by Mx. Granger. Public domain.
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