From Donald Trump at a campaign rally in New Hampshire: “You look at the kind of salaries paid to the heads of the colleges — it’s like they’re running a business, a real business.”
Maybe this suggests something about this bullying blowhard’s appeal. For in just one sentence he manages to summarize two important truths about our colleges and universities: their executives are overpaid and they are not businesses!
I’ve thought about the appeal of The Donald. Why is it that so many support him? What intrinsic quality does he have that the others do not? Why does the Washington establishment detest him?
Money aside, I believe The Donald expresses through his abrasive rhetoric just what so many of us have grown tired of- gotten sick of, really. And that would be the ubiquitous political correctness that has overtaken our public lives.
We have gotten to the point where expressing an opinion can result in exclusion, if not banishment- and yes, at times incarceration. And so I think the phenom of The Donald lies in not what he says, but how he says it. He is rebelling against this inane and suffocating regulation and enforcement of public discourse. And a majority of Americans support that rebellion.
There is no place where this stifling of expression exists than the college campus. “Blowhard” tendencies aside for a moment- I believe The Donald is sending us a very important message- and one we should take to heart.