Higher education institutions worldwide exhibit a pronounced left-leaning bias primarily due to their structural dependence on large government. Public universities rely directly on taxpayer subsidies, while even elite private ones receive massive federal research grants, loan guarantees, and regulatory favors. This creates powerful incentives to support expansive government: more spending sustains enrollment via student aid, funds bureaucratic growth, and aligns research agendas with state priorities in climate, equity, and regulation.
Faculty and administrators, insulated by tenure and public-sector-like employment, internalize the worldview that justifies their funding model—favoring redistribution, identity politics, and skepticism of markets. Dissenting views threaten grant flows and institutional prestige tied to government alignment. Globally, from Europe to Latin America to Asia, state-dominated higher education reproduces this pattern, as independence from Leviathan remains rare. The result is ideological conformity masquerading as expertise.
Gad Saad, Professor of Marketing at Concordia Quebec, quotes E. O. Wilson (Edward Osborne Wilson), the renowned Harvard biologist and professor” “Karl Marx was right, socialism works, it is just that he had the wrong species.”
In the late 1960s, the discovery of massive North Sea oil reserves transformed Norway from a modest fishing, shipping, and hydroelectric economy into one of the world’s richest nations. Oil revenues funded an expansive welfare state and created the world’s largest sovereign wealth fund. This “outsized good fortune” should temper any sense of moral or cultural superiority some Norwegians express toward America. Striking oil is no guarantee of success — see Venezuela or Nigeria. Norway also benefited from American technology, open markets, and capital.
The United States further provided critical security: liberating Norway in WWII and leading NATO during the Cold War, allowing Norway to focus on welfare rather than heavy defense. No student debt! Arrogance ignores contingency. Norway’s success rests on oil rents, a small homogeneous population, high trust, and luck — not inherent superiority. America’s innovations and security role helped create the global order that enabled such fortunes in Norway specifically and Western Europe generally. Recall the American role in the destruction of the German heavy water refinement plants in November 1943 (The Heroes of Telemark) which bears an uncanny resemblance to the present USA Operation Epic Fury in Iran.
Gratitude and humility suit these discussions better than condescension.
The Titan Innovation Fund was introduced to spark innovation at UDM. It supports new, creative ideas that improve the University and student experiences by ensuring that they receive the resources and support needed to survive: https://t.co/tbLwUxkbEbpic.twitter.com/LfqM7Sup1p
We want our young people to learn how to make a living in challenges of their time. The EA Café is a student-run coffee cart operated by the Entrepreneurship Association on the McNichols Campus. Launched in 2023 as a hands-on class project, it has quickly become a popular spot offering coffee, flavored lattes, and other beverages to students, faculty, and staff. The café functions as a real-world learning laboratory. EA students manage every aspect — purchasing supplies, preparing drinks, customer service, marketing, and finances. The movable cart is typically set up in high-traffic locations such as the Engineering Building and campus events. Beyond providing convenient study fuel, the EA Café represents UDM’s strong commitment to experiential learning and student entrepreneurship.
Detroit (meaning “strait”, a narrow passage of water toward Lac Érié ) was founded in 1701 by French explorer and military officer Antoine de la Mothe Cadillac. This was the first permanent European settlement in what is now Wayne County Southeast Michigan and one of the earliest above tidewater in North America. Before the French arrived, the area was inhabited by Native American tribes (Ojibwe, Odawa, Potawatomi, and others). Relations between these tribes and the newcomers from Europe were a mix of alliances, trade, intermarriage, and violence.*
Detroit remained under French control until 1760 (when the British took it during the French and Indian War). Many French families stayed even after that. Detroit still has strong French roots — street names, family surnames, and neighborhoods like Grosse Pointe and Ecorse trace back to those early French settlers. European immigrants to Southeast Michigan — drawn by economic opportunities enabled by the American founding documents (personal responsibility, religious tolerance, limited government, fiscal conservatism) — came in waves for the better part of 150 years.
Canadians across the river (City of Windsor, and much of Southwest Ontario) trace their English origins to Yorkshire, Cumberland, Devon & Cornwall, Highland Scots and all of Ireland. Many Dutch, driven out of New York City, traveled past Detroit and settled in Kent County Western Michigan.
* Deliberately overlooked by Revisionists in the legacy US public school system: ancestral violence among the Native American tribes themselves. Cadillac invited multiple tribes in the Southeast Michigan and Ohio region to settle near Fort Pontchartrain du Détroit for protection against Iroquois invaders from Western New York.
Families Cannot Stand the Gorilla Grip the Democratic Party (Rashida Talib & Shri Thanedar & Debbie Dingell) Has on Southeast Michigan So They Have Fled To The Suburbs
St. Catherine of Siena Academy | Oakland County Michigan
Bryant University is elated to announce that the Bulldog Community has earned a prestigious five-star excellence rating from @QSCorporate Quacquarelli Systems, affirming Bryant’s place among the elite institutions of higher education worldwide. This comprehensive evaluation,… pic.twitter.com/0XzixVQbiN
The Head, Hand and Hertford Programme in Leadership and Innovation, a two-week study abroad course at Oxford, was envisaged by Bryant President Ross Gittell, Ph.D., and his Oxford counterpart, Principal of Hertford College Tom Fletcher, after they were introduced by former Bryant… pic.twitter.com/n8yNn0s0L5
Vicki Hayman, University of Wyoming Extension Nutrition Educator, explains how to put together an English muffin, poached egg, Canadian bacon, and a homemade hollandaise sauce named after Lemuel Benedict, a Wall Street banker who, in 1894, ordered a hangover remedy at the Waldorf Hotel in New York. He requested buttered toast, poached eggs, crisp bacon, and hollandaise sauce.
The hotel’s maître d’hôtel, Oscar Tschirky, was impressed and adapted the dish for the menu, swapping bacon for ham and toast for an English muffin, naming it Eggs Benedict in his honor. Another claim links it to Commodore E.C. Benedict, but the Lemuel story is more widely accepted. The dish’s luxurious combination of poached eggs, ham, English muffin, and hollandaise sauce cemented its fame as a breakfast classic.
Anglosphere colleges have not always been settings for the Ideological Gatekeepers that persist in lording over higher education; despite recent federal legislation chipping away at their hegemony. Until the 1960’s far more colleges were conservative or traditionalist in their political and cultural leanings for much of their history; though exceptions were satirized in Jonathan Swift’s ‘Gulliver’s Travels’.
Historical Context in the UK
Oxford and Cambridge (founded in the Middle Ages) were long seen as bastions of tradition, Anglicanism, and Tory/conservative values. In the 19th century, Oxford undergraduates were predominantly Tory. They emphasized classical education, hierarchy, and continuity with British institutions.
They produced many Conservative leaders and maintained strong ties to the establishment.
United States
Early colonial colleges (Harvard 1636, Yale, Princeton, etc.) were founded with Protestant religious missions to train clergy and gentlemen, instilling traditional moral and classical values. They were socially and culturally conservative by design.
Into the early–mid 20th century, many elite universities maintained conservative social norms. Faculty surveys from the 1950s showed more balance (or moderate lean) compared to today.
The 1950s–early 1960s featured active conservative student groups even on liberal campuses. The broad institutional culture was more aligned with tradition before the 1960s “counterculture” (which doesn’t mean there wasn’t religious and racial discrimination).
Canada, Australia, and Broader Anglosphere
Canadian and Australian universities historically reflected British traditions and were not uniformly left-leaning. Overall, universities across the Anglosphere were shaped by religious foundations, elite reproduction, and classical education traditions that prioritized stability, hierarchy, and Western heritage.
Summa: Anglosphere colleges were frequently “conservative” (traditionalist, establishment-oriented) for centuries. The perception — and the fact of them — as inherently left-wing is largely a post-1960s phenomenon; elevated from the large central government aspirations of Democrat and 36th US President Lyndon B. Johnson, himself a school teacher, through his signature legislation (Higher Education Act of 1965). It has been an uphill battle ever since for families seeking to convey loyalty to traditions of personal responsibility, religious tolerance, limited government, and fiscal conservatism to the next generation.
🎓 Know a student who’s planning for college? Encourage them to take the leap — undergraduate domestic applications to #SDState are free through Nov. 30! 🐰 It’s the perfect time to start their next big adventure. Apply now: https://t.co/rYgGfow5zBpic.twitter.com/gBcvesrP8H
* Approximate Order of Magnitude Estimates: International student fees account for approximately 25–27% of total Australian university revenue. In 2024, this equated to A$12.33 billion out of A$45.17 billion in gross revenue across 42 universities. The vast majority of these international students come from Asia (particularly China, India, Nepal, Vietnam, and other nearby countries), which consistently represent over 90% of international enrolments in higher education. Sources indicate most are from Asian countries, with top sources alone (China ~23%, India ~17%, Nepal ~8%, etc.) comprising well over half, and historical figures showing ~80–90% from Asia overall.
“The Liberals are Coming, and They’re Bringing Fancy Coffee” https://t.co/XykfCFYZgVhttps://t.co/exHU6TR2h9
America is changed by flight from miserable Blue States to better Red States—only to import the policies that created the misery they fled from in the first place. pic.twitter.com/OaVVgrTxJr
The command issued by the character Captain Jean-Luc Picard in the television series “Star Trek: The Next Generation” finds its way into the archive of photographs of Nobel Laureates consorting with politicians at the University of Michigan and elsewhere.
Attendees of the Theoretical Physics Colloquium at the University of Michigan in 1929.
…”There’s not good math explaining forget the physics of it. Math explaining the behavior of complex systems yeah and that to me is both exciting and paralyzing like we’re at very early days of understanding you know how complicated and fascinating things emerge from simple rules…” — Peter Woit [1:16:00]
Since 1936 the Brown Jug has been the ancestral trough of generations of University of Michigan students and faculty — notably. Donald Glaser (inventor of the bubble chamber) and Samuel C. C. Ting (Nobel Laureate) whose offices at Randall Laboratory were a 2-minute walk around the corner from The Brown Jug. As the lore goes, the inspiration happened whilst watching beer bubbles one ordinary TGIF Friday.
New update alert! The 2022 update to the Trademark Assignment Dataset is now available online. Find 1.29 million trademark assignments, involving 2.28 million unique trademark properties issued by the USPTO between March 1952 and January 2023: https://t.co/njrDAbSpwBpic.twitter.com/GkAXrHoQ9T
