Factually! with Adam Conover - America HATES College Students

Episode Date: August 30, 2024

(In addition to your weekly Factually! episode, this week we're bringing you a monologue from Adam. This short, researched monologue originally aired on the Factually! YouTube page, but we to start sharing audio versions of these monologues with our podcast audience as well. Please enjoy, and stay tuned for your regularly scheduled episode of Factually!) Why does it feel like America hates college students? We saddle them with crushing debt, label them as "snowflakes," and even deploy SWAT teams when they dare to use the very educations they’ve received. While recent news has highlighted this with student protests over the war in Gaza, the truth is this is part of a much larger, decades-long, covert war against higher education.Visit https://ground.news/factually to stay fully informed, see through biased media and get all sides of every story. Subscribe for 40% off unlimited access through my link.See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

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Sign up for a free 30-day Audible trial, and your first audiobook is free. Visit audible.ca to sign up. Is it just me, or does America f***ing hate college students? We tell kids that they have to go to college, that it's the ticket to a better life. And then as soon as they get there, we saddle them with debt,

send the cops to beat the s*** out of them, and torture them by making them listen to Jerry Seinfeld give a speech. The object I love the most is the clear barrel Bic pen, a dollar twenty-nine for a box of ten. God, shoot me with rubber bullets! I don't want to be conscious for this! Sure, we like college students when they're blackout drunk or playing sports for our amusement without getting paid. But if students actually want an education, or even worse, use that education to think critically about the world around them, huh, well, we call them snowflakes, hand

them a bill for a hundred grand, and send the SWAT team after them. So what the hell is going on? I mean, higher education was supposed to be the fundamental stepping stone to the middle class for working people. So how has it become the most hated place in America? And why, why do we punish college students for doing exactly what adults told them to do? Well, the answer is that there has been a secret war by wealthy ideologues to destroy higher education in America, to keep working folks poor, powerless, and unable to fight back. And the people who run our nation's colleges are complicit in it. But before we get into it, I want to thank this week's sponsor, Ground News, and everyone

who supports this show on Patreon. Because of your contributions, we are able to tell stories like this one that never get covered in traditional news outlets. So if you'd like to chip in and support our work, head to patreon.com slash Adam Conover. And if you like standup comedy, well, guess what? I am on tour now in all of these fine cities near you. Wow, look how near to you they are. Head to adamconover.net for tickets.

So campus protests were all over the news this year. We saw professors violently arrested, cops getting bonked on the head with big old water bottles, and college students shot in the face with rubber bullets. I'm sorry, but last time I checked, college students were supposed to be doing shots, not getting shot. This was shocking to watch, but with all of the breathless news coverage, it was easy to forget what the protests were actually about. See, the government of Israel's war on Palestine has killed nearly 40,000 people, many of them

children. It's displaced almost 2 million people and has destroyed more than 390 educational institutions, including every single university in Gaza. And a lot of American college students objected to that. Critically, they objected to the fact that their universities were investing in companies like weapons manufacturers that profit from the war. Nearly half of Gaza's population is under 19.

So it's not unreasonable that American 19-year-olds feel strongly about their tuition money being used to kill other 19-year-olds halfway around the world. But hey, if you want to know what these students actually want, you could always just ask them. U.D. Austin divest from companies complicit in the Israeli genocide of Gaza, including weapons manufacturers. Our money should not be funding a genocide. Please stop taking our money and giving it to weapons manufacturers.

It's not okay with us, and we have a right to make that declaration. Even if you don't agree with them, these aren't insane demands coming from the people who, you know, pay the college's bills. I mean, this is America. The customer is always right. If Bud Light drinkers can demand their beer be transphobic,

why can't students demand that their dollars not be spent to fund the killing of children? But more importantly, these protests were part of a long tradition of activism on college campuses, a tradition that these same universities were celebrating just weeks before they sent the cops after their own students. Welcome to Columbia.

We're so proud of our history of student protest, we call ourselves the Activist Ivy. We've honored our student protest against the Vietnam War by publishing a research guide, a special archival collection of items from that era, a metric ton of articles in our college magazine, and even classes about the 1968 protests, all commemorating our totally lit history of student activism. So if you would like to be a part of that history, enroll in Columbia. Well, hold on, what's that?

Students protesting against the war in Gaza? Send the thugs, send the jackbooted thugs. Ha ha, yes, hit those children with your clubs. Brutalize them with your truncheons. Ooh, and make sure to save their bloody clothes for our special exhibit later. And it's not just Columbia betraying its own values. USC barred their own valedictorian from speaking at graduation because they were worried she

might say something about Gaza. Why? Because her major was resistance to genocide. They were literally worried that she might talk about some of the shit they taught her on stage. Imagine if they did that with a biology major. Uh-oh, she might mention the Krebs cycle. Ban her from graduation.

At UC Irvine, the 2024 academic year was dubbed the Year of Free Speech. Their chancellor even taught a course on the importance of free speech on campus. But the minute that those students actually used that free speech, that same chancellor called in a prison bus and hundreds of cops to brutally arrest peacefully protesting students and faculty. Yes, we love to encourage our students to speak freely, as long as they say exactly what we want.

With all these universities literally using physical force to stop their students from speaking, you'd think that all the free speech crusaders would be on the student side, right? Like Senator Tom Cotton, who's been complaining for years that free speech is under attack on college campuses. That guy must have been rushing to defend these students, right? We're here to discuss the little Gazas that have risen up on campuses across America. They're disgusting cesspools of anti-Semitic hate, full of pro-Hamas sympathizers, fanatics, and freaks.

We're here today to discuss the little gazas, disgusting cesspools of sympathizers, fanatics, and freaks. I mean, is it just me, or does this guy sound like he would have told the Beatles to get a haircut? I mean, sympathizers, fanatics, and freaks sound like exactly the sort of people who need free speech protections. I didn't realize that the First Amendment had a no hippies clause.

Now, jokes aside, the rationale university administrators gave for calling the police on these protests was that they were anti-Semitic and threatening to Jewish students. And there is no doubt that many Jewish students said that the protests made them feel unsafe. But at the same time, the protests were attended and often organized by Jewish students, many of whom said that they were protesting because doing so was a part of their Jewish identity.

My grandparents were Holocaust survivors. I joined this encampment because for me, never again is never again for anyone. Students at these encampments held Passover seders. Some even wore watermelon kippahs to express solidarity with the Palestinian people. And when university administrators called the cops on them, those Jewish students didn't just feel threatened,

they were violently attacked, in some cases, by literal hate mobs. At UCLA, a violent mob attacked the student protesters, beating them with sticks, and shooting explosive fireworks and chemicals at them. Over 100 students were injured, and 25 went to the hospital. According to a report by The Guardian,

that mob included right-wing anti-Semites associated with the Proud Boys. So what did UCLA do in response to actual hateful violence against their students? Well, they called the cops, but those cops didn't protect the students, no, they shot the students with rubber bullets and arrested 300 of them.

That's right, the cops saw a bunch of racists beating up children and said, ooh goody, my turn. Look, I wasn't at these protests and I'm not Jewish. But I think it's ridiculous to claim that the police had to be called to protect students from feeling threatened when the result of doing so was students being violently attacked.

Especially because there was another better way to protect these students all along. Talking to them. While UCLA was tear gassing 19 year olds, UC Riverside managed to end their encampment peacefully by negotiating with the students. Wow. Reasoned discussion leading to a peaceful resolution kind of sounds like one of those things they teach at a fancy university. So if it was never necessary for these schools

to send the cops in to beat up their own students, how come so many administrators did? Simple, because they're spineless chicken sh** cowards, but more importantly, because they are under the spell of a political pressure campaign that has been conspiring to undermine higher education from the inside for the past half century. A campaign that hasn't just turned the public and the political system against college students, it has also made higher education

exorbitantly expensive for all of us. But before we get into that, I need to tell you about this week's sponsor, Ground News. I wanna take a moment to talk about the reliability of my sources. If you've watched any of my TV shows or videos, you know how crucial it is for me to have citations to back up my facts.

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This way you can think critically about the news you consume. If you're looking to be smarter about your news consumption, then you have got to check it out at groundnews.com slash factually. Take, for instance, the recent story about the federal appeals court blocking student debt relief. Ground News aggregates over 100 articles on the topic and you can instantly see the differences in how each source reports. A highly factual center-bias source like UPI headlines this as temporarily blocked, while right-leaning low-factuality red state calls it another blow to Joe. Plus, 90% of the articles come from sources rated as highly factual, indicating that most of the coverage is less likely to be sensationalized.

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access. That's what I use. And remember, by subscribing and supporting my sponsors, you'll be not just improving how you consume the news, but also helping to directly support my work. Once again, that's groundnews.com slash factually. Okay, now back to explaining the plot by the wealthy to destroy higher education. See, what a lot of us don't realize is the fact that we have a higher education system

at all in America is one of the great miracles of the 20th century. College wasn't always seen as a path to the middle class. In fact, for a long time, college in America sucked ass. Almost nobody even went. In 1900, less than 1% of students were enrolled in college. And why would they? College back then was for three things. Turning the children of the idle rich into adults of the idle rich,

training priests and lawyers, and having super sick secret societies. Oh, how I love my dear alma mater, where I used to dress up as the demon Baphomet and paddle my classmates on the behind. Education! But all of that changed after World War II, when the government realized that all those thousands of that changed after World War II,

when the government realized that all those thousands of veterans needed something to do during peacetime other than staring at the wall, reflecting on the horrors of war. So the US government passed the GI Bill, which used federal money to pay for veterans to go to college.

And by golly, it was more popular than the Andrews sisters at a USO dance hall. By the mid-50s, almost half of World War II vets had taken advantage of the federal aid and gone to college. And after that little beepin' asshole Sputnik made Americans shit our pants that we were losing the space race,

the government kept pouring money into education so that we could beat the Ruskies with our big American brains. College attendance exploded. Undergraduate enrollments increased 45% between 1945 and 1960, and then doubled again by 1970. And for the first time, higher education wasn't just for the rich kids. It was affordable and accessible to working-class people.

In California, the master plan for higher education dictated that almost anyone who lived in the state could attend college, including the world-class University of California system, for free. Oh, let's see, I could boil in a factory just like my pops and his pops bore him, or I could study nuclear fusion and take a figure drawing class for free. Hubba hubba. Countless working class people attended college for the first time during this period. It was a profound shift that quite literally reshaped America. Because this new opportunity to learn didn't just give them unprecedented access to new professions,

it changed their actual minds. I mean, just think about this for a second. College is the only place where we cultivate and study certain subjects. Philosophy, the study of why we know what we think we know. Political science, the study of the political systems that we build. Sociology and anthropology, the study of humanity itself. Gender studies, race studies, the list goes on.

These are powerful, transformative ideas. They help you see the world differently and help you to understand the systems in which you live and how you might change or fight back against them. And now, for the first time, average working people had access to those ideas and could study them, learn and grow. It was a big f**king deal. And hey, you know what else happened during this time? The Vietnam War.

So a lot of these newly educated students thought, hold up, I've studied political science. Maybe what my government is telling me about this war makes no f**king sense. And I've studied math. If I have 10 friends and 10 of my friends die in Vietnam, that means I have no friends. So a wave of student protests swept the country. And if you look back on it, you can see that this was the moment in which the people actually running the country started to wonder,

hold the f*** up. Did we make a mistake by giving all these average Joes an education? Why, we thought they'd learn how to design bombs, not think about whether or not we should drop them. Maybe we don't actually want these peons to have the gift of knowledge after all. So they began a campaign to steal higher education back from regular people.

And you know what? When you have an evil plan, who better to kick it off than the evilest mother-fucker of the 21st century, Ronald motherfucking Reagan. When Reagan ran for governor of California, he explicitly campaigned against the student's than the evilest mother-fucker of the 21st century, Ronald motherfucking Reagan. When Reagan ran for governor of California, he explicitly campaigned against the student protesters.

He compared the protesters to Nazi brown shirts, called them brats, freaks, and cowardly fascists. And he made ridiculous claims like that, quote, Negroes had threatened a university dean with switchblades at his throat, forcing him to admit them to courses. Now, that's patently ridiculous. It doesn't even make sense. You can't steal classes at Knifepoint because you have to keep coming back to the scene of the crime all semester. But the public fell for these bizarre caricatures of collegiate criminals hook, line, and sinker.

During his campaign, Reagan even promised to use violence against the protesters, saying if it takes a bloodbath, let's get it over with. No more appeasement. And he meant that sh**. After he won the governorship, Reagan literally sent the National Guard, the military, to attack protesters. Hundreds were injured and one kid was even killed. And once Reagan was willing to use violence against college students, well,

just like in the classic film Bedtime for Bonzo, it was monkey see, monkey do. Other politicians started doing the exact same thing. And a few months later, the governor of Ohio called in the National Guard against students at Kent State University. The National Guard opened fire on the kids. Nine students were wounded and four were shot to death by their own country's military

for the crime of peacefully protesting. I mean, some of them weren't even protesters. They were just kids trying to get to class. But just like Reagan, politicians blamed the students for their own deaths. President Nixon said that the Kent State shootings should remind us all once again that when dissent turns to violence, it invites tragedy. In other words, those piece of shit protesters deserved it. Huh, kinda sounds like someone else we know.

These little Garthas are disgusting cesspools of alergoos, sympathizers, somatics, and freaks. I just cannot get enough of doing an impression of this guy. He's such a freak. This guy is, he's a freak! He's a fucking freak! Alright, moving on. But I mean, shooting kids in cold blood is pretty extreme, even for jumped up Scooby-Doo villains like Nixon and Reagan. So why were these politicians so willing to use the military to murder their own students? Because they knew that they were a genuine threat to their power.

A few months after the Kent State Massacre, Ronald Reagan's own Secretary of Education publicly said about colleges in general that we are in danger of producing an educated proletariat. That's dynamite. He even called for limiting people's access to education, saying that we have to be selective on who we allow. And that hinted at the next phase of their plan. Because how did they make college more selective? Simple, Reagan killed free tuition, instituting high fees across California's university system for the first time ever,

and beginning the long slide to college being so expensive, you have to put yourself in a mountain of debt to access it. Before Reagan, tuition at a university of California like Berkeley was free, but now it costs about 20 grand a year, and that's before room and board. Sending your kid to a state school now costs as much as buying a new Kia Soul every year for four f***ing years. And who has that kind of cash? No one but the kids of rich business people and their rich f***ing friends.

Oh, but the wealthy and powerful didn't stop there in their quest to destroy higher education. In 1971, just a year after the Kent State Massacre, future Supreme Court Justice Lewis Powell wrote a memo to a powerful business lobby outlining the plan. He wrote, quote, "'The American economic system is under broad attack, and that the single most dynamic source of those attacks

was the campus.'" I mean, think about that. Despite the fact that multiple students at multiple universities had been beaten, brutalized, and shot to death by their own government, this dude thought big business was the real victim. Oh, won't someone think of the poor CEOs? So Powell called for businesses to fight back by infiltrating universities through speaking engagements, books, publications

and scholarly journals, evaluations of textbooks and by pushing for the hiring of more business-friendly professors. Conservative think tanks ran with this plan, paying for Powell's propaganda program and funding books and articles that made the case to the public that higher education was indulgent and un-American.

This campaign went on for so many decades and worked so thoroughly that today, public confidence in higher education is now at an all-time low. Lawmakers across the country are banning colleges from teaching ideas they don't like, and college administrators have followed in Reagan's footsteps using force

against their own students. All while college becomes more expensive than it ever has been in history. I mean, at this point, people hate college so much that if you even bring up making it as cheap or free as it used to be a few decades ago, you sound like a radical fucking socialist. I mean, think about what a tragedy this is.

Post-World War II, America started bringing higher education to average Americans for the first time ever. Education that opened doors, that helped people rise up in the world, that helped the less powerful build power. And then the rich motherfuckers on top destroyed it because they didn't want us to have it. They don't want us to think critically about the world around us because if we do we might start to notice the boot on our neck and that we don't want our money to go towards the bombing of people in other countries. The rich and powerful don't treat students and faculty as a punching bag because they're naive or entitled or fucking snowflakes. They punish students with violence and debt because education makes us powerful,

because education is a threat to the system that exploits average Americans and people all across the world for profit. Now, there actually is one bit of good news in this story. Because despite the fact that college is more expensive than ever and people have to take on way too much debt to get it, more Americans are also getting college educations than ever have before. And that means we have a chance to use that education to see what's happening for what it is. We can use our history degrees to understand how we got here, our

political science degrees to analyze how the powerful are trying to screw us, and hell, even our supposedly useless English degrees to explain to each other what is happening and why. And if we can do that effectively, maybe we can stop the politicians from using this wave of campus protests to accelerate their war on education like they did the last one. Because the truth is that education is power. And don't let anyone convince you that the people don't deserve it. That was a hate gum podcast.