Can “going high” work again?

Posted on August 25, 2025 by Joe Weber

Gutter level politics has a long history, but we seem to hit new lows daily

For much of early American history, politics at the highest levels was a bloodsport.

Just consider how our founding fathers spoke of one another. To John Adams, Alexander Hamilton was “a bastard brat of a Scotch peddler” and Thomas Jefferson had “a mind, soured… and eaten to a honeycomb with ambition, yet weak, confused, uninformed, and ignorant.” For his part, Jefferson saw Adams as a “hideous hermaphroditical character, which has neither the force and firmness of a man, nor the gentleness and sensibility of a woman.” And, as all fans of the musical know, Hamiton died after Aaron Burr shot him in a duel.

So, is it inconsistent for Gavin Newsom to troll Donald J. Trump by mimicking his tweeting style?

“DONALD IS FINISHED — HE IS NO LONGER ‘HOT,’” the California governor’s press office tweeted. “FIRST THE HANDS (SO TINY) AND NOW ME — GAVIN C. NEWSOM — HAVE TAKEN AWAY HIS ‘STEP.’ MANY ARE SAYING HE CAN’T EVEN DO THE ‘BIG STAIRS’ ON AIR FORCE ONE ANYMORE — USES THE LITTLE BABY STAIRS NOW.”

The governor, a likely 2028 presidential contender, is even hawking merchandise à la Trump. His red caps proclaim “NEWSOM WAS RIGHT ABOUT EVERYTHING!” And he mocks Trump’s bombastic self-promotion in an X post that says “MANY PEOPLE ARE SAYING THIS IS THE GREATEST MERCHANDISE EVER MADE.”

And is it in keeping for Maryland Gov. Wes Moore, another possible presidential candidate, to refer on X to Trump as “President Bone Spurs” who “will do anything to get out of walking” and to offer him a golf cart? As The Wall Street Journal reported, Trump had criticized Moore over “out of control, crime ridden, Baltimore” on Truth Social after Moore had invited the president to walk the streets. “I would much prefer that he clean up this Crime disaster before I go there,” Trump said, and floated the idea of sending the National Guard to the streets of Baltimore, as he has in Los Angeles and Washington, D.C.

Maryland Gov. Wes Moore, source: Johns Hopkins Magazine

The bone spurs reference, of course, was to Trump dodging the draft during the Vietnam War by getting a doctor’s note about foot problems. For his part, Moore served as a captain in the U.S. Army and was deployed to Afghanistan, belatedly getting a Bronze Star.

And then there’s Illinois Gov. J.B. Pritzker’s jibe at the Democratic National Convention last year.

“Donald Trump thinks we should trust him on the economy because he claims to be very rich,” said Pritzker, an heir to the Hyatt Hotels fortune. “Take it from an actual billionaire, Trump is rich in only one thing: stupidity.” More recently, in response to Trump floating the idea of sending troops to Chicago, the governor said: “Donald Trump is attempting to manufacture a crisis, politicize Americans who serve in uniform, and continue abusing his power to distract from the pain he is causing working families.”

Of course, with his combative and bullying style, Trump years ago triggered the insultathon that American politics has become. Slinging the mud, however inartfully, works for him among his underschooled supporters, who often say he “tells it like it is,” unlike the polished politicians of most of the last decades.

It’s not clear when vulgarity and coarseness became synonymous with seeming truthfulness, but neither truth nor simple good manners are things Trump is well-acquainted with, of course. Some of his more juvenile nicknames for people who offend him include Allison Cooper (Anderson Cooper), Maggot Hagerman (Maggie Haberman), Tampon Tim (Tim Walz), Little Marco (Marco Rubio, his own Secretary of State) and, of course, Governor Newscum.

But does it need to be this way? Aside from winning splashy headlines, does it really help a potential president to imitate Trump’s buffoonery? Or would grace and class sell better to those in the electorate who find the schoolyard taunts and WWE-style crudeness tiresome and unworthy of anyone in – or prospectively in – the White House?

Kentucky Gov. Andy Beshear, source: Politico

Consider Andy Beshear, another potential White House occupant. After spring storms clobbered much of Kentucky, Trump belatedly approved emergency aid for the state. Beshear, the state’s popular Democratic governor, was gracious about the president. When asked about a call he got from Trump, Beshear said he and Trump had “good, positive conversation that was only about emergency assistance,” adding that “he was nothing but polite, and positive, and I was nothing but polite and positive.”

Beshear, the son of a former Kentucky governor, was elected to the state’s highest office in 2019 and reelected in 2023. A former attorney general in the state, he is also a deacon in his Christian church, as is his wife. Beshear claims to strive “each day to live out the values of faith and public service,” though right-wing religious figures have attacked what one called Beshear’s “radically progressive political ideology,” mainly blasting the governor’s defense of LGBTQ rights. Beshear riled them with an executive order banning “conversion therapy” on minors.

Beshear in many respects is reminiscent of Bill Clinton, albeit with far better morals. Clinton governed a red state, Arkansas, espoused moderate positions that many in our center-right country could tolerate. Clinton also for the most part avoided gutter-level insults, preferring a gentle jab to a schoolyard slur. Clinton last year poked fun at Trump’s penchant for talking mostly about himself. “So the next time you hear him, don’t count the lies, count the I’s,” he said.

Compared to the way Trump and some Democratic presidential aspirants are talking, that’s mild stuff, little more than blunt observation of the facts. It’s akin to Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro, another possible presidential contender, calling Trump a “pathological liar” after a debate with President Biden that was, in fact, marked by falsehoods from Trump. Similarly, it was fair game for Shapiro to say that Trump was “obsessed with continuing to spew hate and division in our politics” after Trump called him “the highly overrated Jewish Governor,” a phrase calculated to whip up Trump’s antisemitic followers.

Of course, Trump’s baiting approach drives responses that, even when they are factually on target, seem like descents to his level.

As for Clinton’s stab at Trump’s egocentricity, the president has done little in office but prove how self-aggrandizing he is. A huge image of him now draping the Labor Department not only reflects his megalomania, but evokes the propagandistic self-adulation of the world’s worst despots, men who ruled countries such as North Korean, Romania, Iraq and, of course, Germany.

Self-adulation at the Labor Dept., source: Meidastouch Network

Can someone such as Beshear bring the Democratic Party and the nation back to some sense of civility? Some sense of personal modesty and integrity? Has that boat sailed forever, throwing us back to the days when national leaders vied for who could be more vicious?

“When they go low, we go high,” is how Michelle Obama put it in an address at the 2016 Democratic National Convention. Sadly, she took a sharper tack at last year’s convention, accusing Trump of “going small.” The former first lady said: “Going small is petty, it’s unhealthy, and, quite frankly, it’s unpresidential… It’s his same old con: doubling down on ugly, misogynistic, racist lies as a substitute for real ideas and solutions that will actually make people’s lives better.”

Still, it’s entirely proper to attack misogyny, racism and con artistry, along with the savagery Trump and his minions have brought to bear against immigrants. His conduct and that of his Justice Department and ICE against Kilmar Abrego Garcia, for instance, is despicable. So, too, must we condemn his dictatorial aspirations, as shown by his troop deployments in American cities, along with the sheer vindictiveness of his actions against critics. Consider the FBI raid on the home of John Bolton, a former Trump ally who has his old boss’s number all too well and often lays that out in TV appearances, infuriating the president.

“The real offender here is a President who seems to think he can use the powers of his office to run vendettas,” the often Trump-friendly editorialists at The Wall Street Journal said. “We said this was one of the risks of a second Trump term, and it’s turning out to be worse than we imagined.”

Lambasting loathsome policies in virile and sharp terms is different from calling someone “Crooked Joe” or “Sleepy Joe.” Or, as Trump labeled Bolton, calling someone “a lowlife” and a “sleazebag” — terms he applied to the Yale lawyer who served under Presidents Reagan and George H.W. Bush before becoming a once-trusted adviser in the first Trump White House. We need bold and sharp criticisms of what Trump does, as well as smart insights into his character or lack of it.

But how much longer will all this ugliness last? Will it end in 2029? Or has Trump so polluted the atmosphere that it will take a generation to clear the foul air? Can a Beshear or someone like him win against Trumpist toadies such as JD Vance by going high? In time, we’ll find out.

Are there really coincidences?

Posted on August 15, 2025 by Joe Weber

Synchronicity at a time of loss makes one wonder

Five Weber siblings, years ago. Madeline is in the front middle.

Some say there are no such things as coincidences. Instead, they are messages of a sort, pointing us toward some purpose or path.

For me, such pseudo-mystical notions are almost always poppycock. They’re up there in the Twilight Zone with crystals, Sedona vortexes and Tarot cards. But now that I am grieving the loss of a beloved sister and have been confronted with a few such coincidences, I wonder what I am to make of them.

Consider these episodes of what psychologist Carl Jung called “synchronicity:”

First, before she passed a couple weeks ago, my sister Madeline told me she was unafraid to die. Indeed, she badly wanted to end the suffering that cancer had inflicted on her and all of us who loved her. She said she wanted to just go to sleep, with the help of drugs, and not wake up.

That was tough for me and all of us to hear, of course. Very tough. I had to bite my tongue from saying, “But Madeline, none of us can bear you leaving.”

Still, in coincidence number one, a friend just handed me a powerful book about death, “The Beauty of What Remains” by Rabbi Steve Leder. “After more than thirty years, I have visited nearly a thousand dying people, and so far not one – not one single person who is really, actively dying – has told me he or she is afraid,” the rabbi writes. “A family sometimes asks me to visit with their dying loved one because they are afraid of life without them or they assume their loved one is panicked, but the agenda of the dying is not one of fear, it is one of peace.”

The ill people the rabbi dealt with didn’t want to cause pain to their survivors by departing, but they felt their time had come. And they were okay with that, just as Madeline was.

A second coincidence is my sitting here now, writing in a coffeeshop in Frisco, Colorado, with “Badlands” playing in the background. That song, of course, is a classic from Bruce Springsteen, and includes the lyric “Well, I believe in the love that you gave me/I believe in the faith that could save me/I believe in the hope/And I pray that someday/It may raise me above these/Badlands …”

Madeline, who lived not far from the Boss, was a devoted Springsteen fan, having seen more than 100 of his shows. All of us who are missing my sister are living in the badlands at the moment. We’re likely to be here for a long, long time, I expect.

But I ask you also to consider coincidence No. 3. Just today, the new issue of “The Atlantic” just arrived. It carries a long piece about assisted death in Canada. Euthanasia – or, as the Canadians call it, Medical Assistance in Dying or MAID – has been surging in the country ever since it was legalized in 2016. Today, it accounts for about one in 20 deaths in the country, with more than 60,000 MAID demises reported since legalization.

Can these three things be accidental? Can it be just coincidence that for the last several days, as friends and I marked Madeline’s passing by gathering in prayer, that I’ve told them about a) her enthusiasm for Springsteen and b) her lack of fear about dying, her wish to end her life on her terms?

After battling cancer for too many years, Madeline wanted only for the pain to end. But when she told a hospice nurse she wanted to just fall asleep — with the help of a lethal drug – she was told that was not legal in New Jersey. She could have pain medication, but nothing that would hasten her passing.

Sadly, then, my sister’s suffering lasted too many days longer than it should have because assisted death is under a legal cloud in New Jersey. That would not have been the case in Canada or in eight U.S. states where medically aided death is fully legal. While the Jersey legislature legalized the process in New Jersey in 2019, opponents have apparently put it on ice with a bill rendering it illegal. That bill is sitting in committee, vying with another that would make such a process easier. With such legislative confusion, it seems, my sister’s hospice nurses would not give her the option she wanted.

It’s hard to know why the two legislators behind the anti-euthanasia bill, Republicans Bob Auth and John DiMaio, oppose medically assisted dying because there is little in the press about their effort. But generally opponents fear the potential of abuse and coercion, particularly for vulnerable individuals including the elderly, disabled, or those lacking adequate access to healthcare. They don’t want to normalize suicide, as apparently the Canadians have.

Also, religions including Judaism and Catholicism, my sister’s devoutly held faith, oppose euthanasia. They hold that our bodies are divine gifts that we don’t have the right to eliminate. While some religious authorities permit the withholding of life-preserving treatment, they don’t allow for drugs that would end life.

But who should make the call here? If a person with a terminal disease wants to bring the suffering to an end, should he or she have the right to demand help for that? If such a person has made all his or her goodbyes and come to terms with the inevitability of their death, should outsiders nullify their choice?

And, if one believes that G-d chooses one’s time to pass, could it not be true that the moment of assisted death is the chosen time?

Some believe that assisted suicide amounts to murder, even if people taking their lives administer the fatal drugs themselves, albeit with others providing the toxins. But do those people have the right to, in effect, prolong another’s agony now that medicine has the ability to eliminate it?

I would have wanted much more time with Madeline, many more years, in fact. She was just 65, younger than three of us in the family.

I will long mourn her. I will also long remember the good times she gave all of us, the way Madeline – the middle child of seven of us — was an anchor for us. I will recall how she helped each of my siblings whenever and however they needed it. I will think fondly of her intelligent and compassionate politics, a subject of many a phone conversation between us, along with talk of family. And I will think fondly of our visits to one another, the too-few times our busy lives intersected.

I’m reminded of other lyrics in Springsteen’s song. He sings: “Badlands, you gotta live it everyday/Let the broken hearts stand/As the price you’ve gotta pay/Keep pushin’ ’til it’s understood/These badlands start treating us good.”

Madeline’s death broke the hearts of all of us, most of all her wonderful husband and three devoted sons, all of whom were with her in the final days. That heartbreak was inevitable as cancer took her away from us. But it shouldn’t have made her suffer even a minute longer than she would have wanted, the time she needed to make her farewells.

A final note on synchronicity, which fascinated Jung. He told of a famous case in which a beetle , a golden scarab, appears in a patient’s dream and then, just as she’s telling Jung about it, a similar bug taps on the window near them.

Could such a thing be accidental, one must wonder? Or was the universe telling Jung and his patient something? And, if so, what could that possibly be? Was it a reminder that not everything in our world can be rationally explained?

Rationalist as I am, I am nonetheless sure that not everything can be explained. But for Jung, the important thing about synchronicity was not that it appeared to be a blast of paranormality, something from the great beyond or the collective unconscious. Instead, what fascinated him was how people found meaning in coincidences, how what was going on within their minds or lives gave meaning to external things that seemed to echo those internal events.

I will long hear echoes of my beloved sister and that is a great comfort.

Entering the reality-distortion zone

Posted on August 12, 2025 by Joe Weber

Trump’s truth-scrapping efforts reach deep

Big Brother, source: Michael Radford’s film,’1984;’ source: El País

George Orwell’s Ministry of Truth in “1984” had a peculiar mission. Its job was not to spread truth at all, but rather to insure that history and current information aligned with the views and goals of the infallible Big Brother and his ruling party. When reality differed, the descriptions and accounts had to be bent accordingly.

Echoes of that approach abound today, it seems.

Take, for instance, what Washington, D.C. looks like. The district that Donald J. Trump sees is a dystopian spectacle of “crime, bloodshed, bedlam and squalor and worse.” The capital, he tells us, has been “taken over by violent gangs and bloodthirsty criminals” along with “drugged out maniacs and homeless people.”

Presumably, the president is not referring to the Jan. 6, 2021, mob he incited at the Capitol or to the current mostly supine GOP members of Congress and the Senate. Certainly, he’s not referring to the district crime rates as reported by its police.

If one looks at the D.C. police reports, violent crime in the capital is dropping. Homicides fell 32 percent in the district between 2023 and 2024, to 187 last year, the lowest tally since 2019. And the murder rate is down again about 11 percent this year, with 100 recorded so far. Indeed, per capita, D.C. doesn’t even crack the list of the 30 most dangerous cities in the U.S.

To Trump, as with Big Brother and other would-be tyrants, however, reality is not what data tells us. It is, instead, what Trump conjures up in his own mind. Indeed, independently developed data is, to him, an inconvenience that should be suppressed. And incendiary language must reflect the reality of his fevered imagination.

Independent information gets in the way of Trump’s efforts to dispatch federal troops to whatever scene he deems appropriate, for instance. Thus, immigration is an “invasion” a term that justifies the development of detention camps and roundups on the streets by masked authorities. Thus, military forces can be stationed on Los Angeles streets to suppress a “rebellion,” even if a major general involved doesn’t seem to see that.

And independently generated data gets in the way of Trump’s vision of an economy now on the way to a “golden age.” When a Bureau of Labor Statistics report suggested that hiring slowed in July and was weaker than expected in the prior two months, Trump took umbrage at the figures and so fired the bureau director. He moved to install a Heritage Foundation lackey who has suggested deep-sixing monthly jobs reports and presumably will generate shinier numbers.

When people outside of government, moreover, don’t sing his tune, Trump argues for finding new crooners. Thus, he now is pressuring Goldman Sachs to can Jan Hatzius, the firm’s longtime chief economist whose views on the economy-draining effects of tariffs mirror those of many other economists. Trump took to Truth Social to say that firm chief executive David Solomon should “go out and get himself a new Economist.”

Reality bending by Trump and his minions entered a new realm with the president’s deployment of 800 National Guards in D.C. and his seizure of the police department there, as well as his attack on the nation’s preeminent Wall Street firm. These big stretches by Trump could amount in the end to little more than headline-grabbing stunts designed to distract us from the ways his staffers are burying Epstein scandal information.

But Trump’s deflection and misinformation efforts aren’t all that new. Consider the administration’s moves to rewrite American history in national parks and historic sites with a March executive order mandating that such sites not “perpetuate a false reconstruction of American history,” but instead emphasize the “progress of the American people” and the “grandeur of the American landscape.”

No matter whether it’s true or not, unflattering information is not welcome in the America Trump is making great again.

And this reality-twisting, whether economic or cultural, seems likely only to deepen. The White House now plans to review exhibits by the Smithsonian Institution to “ensure alignment with the President’s directive to celebrate American exceptionalism, remove divisive or partisan narratives, and restore confidence in our shared cultural institutions,” as one lickspittle wrote. The effort will “support a broader vision of excellence that highlights historically accurate, uplifting, and inclusive portrayals of America’s heritage.”

Propaganda, in other words.

National Museum of African American History; source: Washington, D.C.

One can only wonder how this will play out in a couple Smithsonian facilities that have been more thorough in efforts to fully describe our history, the National Museum of African American History and Culture and the National Museum of the American Indian. Administrators may be hard-pressed to find a lot uplifting about the nation’s earliest years regarding Blacks and Native Americans, though they will surely be pushed to do so.

Of course, reality distortion is a familiar tack for many Trump toadies. His press secretary, Karoline Leavitt, claims that Trump’s White House is the “most transparent in history.” So why, one wonders, is that White House removing transcripts of Trump’s comments from an official database – which would allow historians and others to easily check his tortured words against reality — and instead is posting limited numbers of videos?

Writing as Orwell, BBC producer Eric Arthur Blair published “1984” in 1949. Blair was appalled by the totalitarian regimes in Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union. But his fictional “Oceania,” the superstate that was home of the Ministry of Truth, included the Americas and the British isles.

Some 76 years on, at least one political leader seems to be doing his best to make Orwell’s vision a reality — of sorts.

“Education’s purpose is to replace an empty mind with an open one.”

Posted on August 8, 2025 by Joe Weber

But Malcolm Forbes’s famous admonition holds no brief in Trumpworld

J.B. Milliken, source: University of California

Talk about a baptism by fire. Only a week into his job as president of the sprawling University of California system, James (J.B.) Milliken, has been plunged into a risky battle with Donald J. Trump. Milliken has had to be unequivocal about a $1 billion extortion demand Trump’s minions are trying to impose on UCLA, one of the pillars of the 10-campus system.

“As a public university, we are stewards of taxpayer resources and a payment of this scale would completely devastate our country’s greatest public university system as well as inflict great harm on our students and all Californians,” said Milliken, a son and grandson of small-town Nebraska bankers. “Americans across this great nation rely on the vital work of UCLA and the UC system for technologies and medical therapies that save lives, grow the U.S. economy, and protect our national security.”

Ostensibly, the federal demand is being made to settle claims that university officials tolerated antisemitism in demonstrations against the Gaza War in the 2023-24 academic year and that its diversity polices breached anti-discrimination laws. The demand is being accompanied by requirements for policy changes dealing with admissions and gender identity in sports and housing, as well as the abolition of scholarships for racial or ethnic groups.

In fact, however, the diktat is the biggest yet in a campaign inspired by authors of a Project 2025 effort, Project Esther, which nominally targets antisemitism on campuses, but more broadly assaults “wokeism” in the academic world. The project was developed largely by Victoria Coates, a former deputy national security adviser to Trump and vice president at The Heritage Foundation. Coates, a self-described committed Christian, holds three degrees in Italian Renaissance art history, and planned on an academic career until she grew alienated by what she called a “very noxious anti-Western worldview” at her alma mater, the University of Pennsylvania, according to The New York Times.

Columbia University, source: the university

The $1 billion demand ratchets up the stakes in the longstanding Trumpist and Heritage Foundation assault on major universities. The administration forced Columbia University into a $200 million deal and Brown University into a $50 million settlement. Negotiations are under way for a resolution with Harvard, with a $500 million figure being bandied about. Still more extortions could well be on the way from other schools under the gun by Trump.

But these deals beg several enormous questions. How will extracting the hefty sums of cash advance education at these schools, for instance? Sure, policy changes that could include cuts in pro-Palestinian academic departments could help foster a balance in curricular offerings, but does cutting diversity efforts have anything but a negative impact? If the administration truly aimed to improve higher education, wouldn’t it be making more money available, perhaps supporting educational efforts more sympathetic to Israel, not imposing brutal penalties?

Already, the University of California has overhauled practices in some areas called for by the Trump administration — including a ban on protest encampments and the abolition of diversity statements in hiring, as the Los Angeles Times reported. So, why does Trump want to humble the system financially? What really underlays his animus toward these schools?

Certainly, part of this must be longstanding Republican animosity to California and perhaps to the likelihood that Democratic Gov. Gavin Newsom could be a presidential candidate in the 2028 election. The $1 billion proposal came just a day after Newsom said UC should not bend “on their knees” to President Trump, as the other schools have.

“We’re not Brown, we’re not Columbia, and I’m not going to be governor if we act like that,” Newsom said. “Period. Full stop. I will fight like hell to make sure that doesn’t happen.”

Even more personally, however, one must wonder at the motivations of a disgruntled former academic such as Coates, or of the middling transfer student into Penn’s Wharton School, Trump. Are they driven by grudges, by a need to punish those by whom they feel wronged or who shunned them? Recall that one of Trump’s former professors called him “the dumbest goddamn student I ever had.” Certainly, the rarely articulate Trump’s feelings about schooling are clear from his plans to eliminate the Department of Education.

Explorations of Trump’s motivations are legion. Perhaps one of the best, however, is a new offering by The New Yorker’s David Remnick. As a child, Remnick writes, “Little Donny” was “a pigtail puller, an unruly loudmouth who tormented his teachers and hurled insults and rocks at other kids. When Trump was thirteen, his father, Fred, shipped him off to a military school, in Cornwall, New York.” There, “Trump made it plain that his delight in domination was the immutable core of him.”

Remnick tells us that Marc Fisher, who co-authored “Trump Revealed,” an early biography and character analysis, once told PBS that, as a cadet, Trump “used a broomstick as a weapon against classmates who didn’t listen to him when he told them what to do. He was in part enforcing the rules of the academy, but he was equally so enforcing the rules of Donald Trump.”

There’s no doubt that Trump exults in having powerful people and institutions quake at his feet. “They’re all bending and saying, ‘Sir, thank you very much,’ ” he bragged, after certain law firms started making their pitiful arrangements with the White House. “They’re just saying, ‘Where do I sign?’”

But, even beyond Trump’s need to force schools to quiver before him, other worrisome trends may cloud our national future long after the would-be tyrant is gone. Where we were once a country that built great universities — private and public — because we realized they were essential to national growth, much popular sentiment is against expansion — at least as reflected by rightist politicians. Hostility to higher education is widespread.

California may be case story No. 1. Growth was long the mainstay of the system, which now serves more than 295,000 students. Before he landed in the cauldron he’s now in, Milliken ran other university systems, getting an early start as president of the University of Nebraska, from which he had graduated in 1979. When he led the NU system, from 2004 to 2014, the university was punching far above its weight, so much so that its flagship campus in Lincoln joined the Big Ten athletic and academic conference in 2011.

Milliken, a lawyer, got his post at Nebraska in part because he had worked as the legislative assistant to an influential Republican congresswoman from the state, Virginia D. Smith, the only woman to serve in the House from the state. Republicans such as Smith had long championed higher education and she served on the House Education Committee.

Enthusiastic backing for higher education among Nebraska Republicans for decades allowed officials to build a university where nearly 50,000 students now attend, most hailing from a statewide population barely topping 2 million. Without such crucial support, the school’s flagship campus in Lincoln could never be good enough to rub shoulders with the likes of the University of Michigan, Northwestern, the University of Southern California and Rutgers in the Big Ten.

And yet, some MAGA-inspired state leaders today are now pulling in their horns in ways that threaten the university’s health and prospects. At the flagship campus alone, legislative trims are forcing the chancellor to direct officials to come up with $27.5 million in cuts to a $1.67 billion budget for the coming year, atop several years of smaller budget trims. Thus, the campus and the university overall are offering deals for veteran tenured faculty to quit early, a move that will reduce the school’s vitality, and officials may shrink or consolidate departments that took decades to build.

“I suspect there will be programs, majors, units, departments, all of those things will change,” said journalism professor and faculty senate president John Shrader, a former colleague of mine in UNL’s journalism school. He said the faculty expected some cuts, but the sheer scale—$27.5 million compared to last year’s $5 million—is staggering. “Not one part of this campus will be unaffected.”

Oh, how times have changed. Some time ago, I was privileged to write a biography of an influential Republican leader, Clayton Yeutter, a Nebraska-born statesman who headed the Republican National Committee along with taking on many other crucial government roles. When Yeutter testified at his confirmation hearing to become the U.S. Secretary of Agriculture in 1989, he spoke passionately about the importance of education.

“We should not aspire to competing with the rest of the world on wage rates, in agriculture or anywhere else,” Yeutter argued. “We must compete on the basis of technology, innovation, entrepreneurship, creativity, institutional flexibility and personal and institutional freedoms. All those are built on education!”

Certainly, Yeutter knew first-hand about the power of schooling. His training at the University of Nebraska, from his undergraduate years through a law degree and doctorate in agricultural economics, lifted him from the life as the son of a small-town immigrant farmer into some of the nation’s most important jobs. Along with Ag Secretary and RNC head, he served as Ronald Reagan’s U.S. Trade Representative, where he opened the U.S. and the world to freer global trade.

Long before his Washington achievements, however, as a governor’s top aide he had championed funding for the University of Nebraska. His efforts laid the groundwork for the school to expand into its current four-campus system, which now includes membership in the Big Ten for its flagship campus.

The growth in the NU system has been breathtaking. The system’s nearly 50,000 students, spread across Lincoln and campuses in Kearney and Omaha, are a far cry from the fewer than 7,000 when Yeutter graduated in 1952. The university’s growth far outstrips gains in the state’s population, which was below 1.37 million in Yeutter’s time and still barely tops 2 million.

No doubt that story has been echoed all around the country, at least in states where education has been a priority. At least for now, however, the era of growth has been brought to a grinding halt by today’s Republicans. Will they or their successors someday look back on this time with shame, seeing it as a period when they shortchanged the nation?

One can only hope that Milliken and his like can prevail or, at least, show up the Trumpist forces for the damage they are causing and its effect on our young. As a Nebraskan might say, the seed corn must be kept healthy. Today, it’s at great risk.

The Big Picture

Monthly Archives: August 2025