Complete Colorado reports that the University of Colorado (CU) has hired a former Biden administration operative at a stunning salary. Andrew Mayock will be CU’s “vice chancellor for sustainability”—whatever that means.
According to the same article, Mayock’s hiring follows an addition of another professional leftist to the CU payroll. When fringe benefits are added in, each of the two is being paid more than $400,000 annually!
This employment pattern has become common at some state universities. When Democratic governor Bill Ritter left office, Colorado State University created a position for him as head of the “Center for the New Energy Economy.” (The title itself begs the question of whether there really is a “new energy economy”—or just a fantasy created by government subsidies.)
Similarly, the University of Montana (UM), where I served on the faculty for 24 years, created a “Center for the Rocky Mountain West” to employ washed-up liberal politicians. UM also lodged a thoroughgoing liberal (although a pretend Republican) as chairman of the advisory board of another one of its centers. From that perch, he regularly intervenes in state politics—invariably from the Left.
Observe that none of these new employees had a significant academic background. According to CSU’s biography of Ritter, one of his qualifications was that “he operated a food distribution and nutrition center in Zambia.”
Employment practices like these further demonstrate—if anyone needs a further demonstration—how state universities like CU no longer serve the purposes for which they were created. CU in particular should be split into its constituent campuses and either closed down or privatized.
Why state universities were created
Most state universities were created to train young people in useful trades, such as teaching and agriculture. Some, such as CU, were created to transmit knowledge, Judeo-Christian values, and Western culture to the rising generation.
You might ask whether private institutions could do those things just as well or better. The putative response to this question is that education is what economists call a “public good.”
To qualify as a “public good,” a service or commodity must benefit not only the purchaser but the entire society. And it certainly is true that the entire society benefits from the transmission of cultural literacy, Western culture, and solid research.
But to be a public good, a service or commodity must meet another criterion as well: Its immediate consumers must pay so little that an insufficient amount would be produced, unless government subsidizes it. Those who claim post-secondary education is a public good argue that student tuition is not sufficient for society to get the benefits of cultural literacy, cultural transmission, and research: Hence, the government must chip in.
Careful readers may observe that much of what colleges and universities now offer is not beneficial, but useless or positively harmful. They might observe also that if higher education really is a public good, the state can subsidize it by offering scholarships. There is no need for the state to own and run the institutions.
These are valid points. But the point I want to make right now is that many state universities no longer serve their justifying purpose: They have betrayed their trust.
How universities betray their trust
One way a state university betrays its trust is by hiring favored politicians with no academic credentials and overpaying them. This practice is wasteful and excludes conservative scholars who might really have something to offer. It also tells us that the university does not exhibit the impartiality necessary to encourage free inquiry.
CU’s actions are a case in point. Compare its latest political hires with how it treated constitutional law professor John Eastman, a leading conservative scholar. Because the terms of a grant required it to hire a conservative, CU employed Eastman for its Bruce D. Benson Center for the Study of Western Civilization. But when CU learned Eastman was advising President Trump in the aftermath of the 2020 election (horrors!), CU locked him out of most of his job.
Or consider how CU hired and promoted fraudulent “scholar” Ward Churchill because he allegedly checked the Native American diversity box (which he didn’t). Or for a non-Colorado example, consider how Senator Elizabeth Warren, with a mediocre academic record, waltzed her way to the top of the university pyramid on the bogus claim that she also was an Indian.
Universities further breach their trust by the toxic nature of what they teach. As the outbreak of campus pro-Hamas demonstrations illustrated, today’s state universities are more likely to foster political barbarism than to transmit Judeo-Christian values and Western culture. Many also are smothered by an authoritarian ideology that impairs the open debate and free inquiry they are supposed to foster.
You can argue, moreover, that a primary impact of state universities today is not educational at all. Rather, it is that they are political bases for the national Democratic Party. As I have documented elsewhere, university towns are a crucial part of the coalition of dependency that elects Democratic tickets in states that are otherwise Republican. University campuses also offer platforms for political demonstrations that the left-of-center media publicize far and wide and that left-of-center politicians exploit for their own purposes.
How They Get Away With It
Key reasons state universities get away with this conduct—even in conservative states—are alumni associations and the popularity of their sports teams. Among supporters of CU sports teams, shouting “Go Buffs!” seems to stymie a lot of clear thinking.
Conservatives, libertarians, and moderates need to get beyond the sports slogans and start electing policymakers who recognize that the state university model is no longer working. CU in particular should be broken up into its constituent campuses, privatized, and left to sink or swim. If we choose to subsidize higher education, we should do it by granting scholarships that students can apply to tuition at competing institutions.
Higher education—and most of the rest of us—would be a lot better off.
Robert G. Natelson, a former constitutional law professor who is senior fellow in constitutional jurisprudence at the Independence Institute in Denver, authored “The Original Constitution: What It Actually Said and Meant” (3rd ed., 2015). He is a contributor to the Heritage Foundation’s “Heritage Guide to the Constitution.”
