The "unsolvable" problem politically here is the United States' university's international student population. This contradicts the current nativism streak in Trump style politics. Yet you cannot have the best universities in the world without a focus for attracting global talent.
Apart from that, I've always been of the opinion that the reports of Excessive Campus Liberalism in conservative populist media have been greatly exaggerated. I'm sure there are some grains of truth for certain school fields and certain colleges, but from what I saw when I went to college, strong politics one way or another wasn't terribly true for the vast majority. Certainly at the very least most in the engineering fields were too focused on studying to pay huge amounts of attention to political concerns. :)
The overall distrust of colleges among Republicans is very new, only in the last few years (https://www.insidehighered.com/news/2017/07/11/dramatic-shif...). I have no idea how this new attitude will play out, especially considering that one half of the Republican coalition is the business wing of the party, which tends to overall be a college educated workforce. Education still plays a big role in United States social status and career, and a strongly educated workforce and strong research facilities (largely oriented around colleges at this time) is one of the attractive elements of this nation (to businesses, even!). That so many of one party feel that college is only about "adversarial political positions" is a bad sign to me.
Apart from that, I've always been of the opinion that the reports of Excessive Campus Liberalism in conservative populist media have been greatly exaggerated. I'm sure there are some grains of truth for certain school fields and certain colleges, but from what I saw when I went to college, strong politics one way or another wasn't terribly true for the vast majority. Certainly at the very least most in the engineering fields were too focused on studying to pay huge amounts of attention to political concerns. :)
The overall distrust of colleges among Republicans is very new, only in the last few years (https://www.insidehighered.com/news/2017/07/11/dramatic-shif...). I have no idea how this new attitude will play out, especially considering that one half of the Republican coalition is the business wing of the party, which tends to overall be a college educated workforce. Education still plays a big role in United States social status and career, and a strongly educated workforce and strong research facilities (largely oriented around colleges at this time) is one of the attractive elements of this nation (to businesses, even!). That so many of one party feel that college is only about "adversarial political positions" is a bad sign to me.