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What’s the next frontier for the slashers and burners in the Iowa State legislature to remake Iowa into the next Mississippi. If you nose around online sometimes you will see a hint at what may be the next goofball idea coming down the pipe that would fit the MAGA agenda of wrecking state institutions.

These ideas are passed down from the “think tanks” such as Heritage Foundation or “conservative” model legislation groups like ALEC who work non-stop 24 X 7 X 365 on ways to move money from the poor to the rich and turn the country into an oligarchy. Based on our current situation they are pretty successful. 

Remember, Kim Reynolds did not originate ideas like the 6 week abortion ban, tax cuts for the wealthy, smashing unions, banning books or the most recent outrage taking money for public education and funneling it to private, religious schools that do not have to answer to any one. This law tears down a once proud public school system and replaces it with snake oil.

One of MAGA’s primary goals is to trash anything “public” that has been built over generations for the good of all and replace it with a privatized version that funnels money into a few hands while offering a product that is usually just a shadow of what the public version once was.

We are seeing this now in our K-12 schools. We have seen it in our parks, public housing, hospitals, in some states the prison system (I sure expect Iowa to move into privatized prisons soon), public water and other utilities, and in Iowa, Medicaid. MAGA thought: if it’s Public, let’s ruin it and let somebody make big bucks off it. Who cares if the middle class and poor can’t use it anymore? 

Now it looks like the newest trend is to attack the public colleges, turning them into glorified job training centers and moving non-utilitarian courses off to private colleges and universities. West Virginia U. West Virginia U. is the latest university to be taken apart in the MAGAs fevered dream of destroying the public commons for their nirvana of privatized college

Below is a discussion from Professor Lisa M. Corrigan on The Nation magazine. This excerpt is from a non-paywall version of the article. 

Last week, West Virginia University (WVU) announced a plan to raze some of its core programs. The public land-grant university intends to eliminate 9 percent of its majors (32 programs total), all of its foreign language programs, and 7 percent of its full-time faculty members (169 in total). The departments targeted for these massive cuts count Truman, Marshall, Fulbright, and Rhodes scholars among their alumni. These cuts were recommended by the consulting firm rpk GROUP, and there’s every reason to believe they’re a trial balloon for doing this elsewhere. Anyone who cares about higher education should be alarmed about what this portends for public universities.

These changes are the functional equivalent of an atomic bomb at WVU, and stand to make it increasingly difficult for the institution to meet its stated mission to create “a diverse and inclusive culture that advances education, healthcare and prosperity for all by providing access and opportunity.” So why is it doing this?

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Today, like many land-grant universities, WVU sits at the convergence of several cultural and economic tectonic shifts that are working in tandem to radically transform education. Foremost among these shifts is the changing economic climate of higher ed. WVU, like many higher-education institutions, has been plagued by gross financial mismanagement by administrators and consultants who have funneled money into massive administrative bloat and capital projects at the expense of faculty hires and support for faculty and graduate students. The university is currently facing a $45 million budget gap, and is seemingly uninterested in shrinking administrator salaries, creating artificial conditions for austerity.

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Meanwhile, higher education has become a major political target for the right. One only needs to look at the takeover of the New College of Florida (to name but one example of the GOP’s “war on woke”) to see how academic expertise has come under fire as a political wedge issue in this campaign season—while the GOP’s privatization program, perfected under Reagan, funnels public money into both tax cuts for the wealthy and various grifts. The book bans, censorship, purges of area studies programs, and targeting of academics at public institutions (particularly in the South) are all calculated to decrease the public’s confidence in public education so that it can be dismantled and replaced with private corporations, which lack regulation and oversight.

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The future of higher education looks bleak. {my bolding – ed.} Money will flow to elites in private schools, who will benefit from comprehensive language instruction, liberal arts, inclusive critical thinking skills, and a global curriculum, and thus have access to global careers in the arts, finance, diplomacy, national security, international business, international law, AI, and other fields. Students at state schools will receive the education that the oligarchs want them to, based on their largesse.

So who will it be when the Iowa Legislature and destroyer-in-chief Kim Reynolds takes the old meat ax to Iowa’s university system? Based on cuts over the years plus a barely disguised animosity MAGA legislators have for the U of Iowa and Johnson County, I feel safe in guessing that the U of Iowa will be the first ‘experiment’ in gutting one of the Iowa universities. But at some point if the MAGA Party stays in power, all of the schools will be gutted.