I initially titled this post "political polarization and higher education," but that was not accurate.  The primary phenomenon is not "polarization," the primary phenomenon is the massive transformation of the American conservative movement towards white nationalist reaction. This has been noted so many times it's wrong to not call it what it is.  And, to be honest, the hostility towards colleges that is attached to this is really a hostility to education in general, and to experts and to reality.  It is sort of a self-perpetuating phenomenon, as the suspicion of education simply makes people less informed as time goes on.

The latest example is what is happening in Alaska.  It's depressing.  But not wildly unusual.  

I'm not saying here isn't lots to fix in universities.  We can always improve, and there are lots of ways in which we could do better, or at least stop being so bad.  And ideologically, especially in the humanities, there is a remarkable homogeneity, and I doubt that's entirely due to us each individually, uninfluenced by one another, reaching identical conclusions.  Louis Menand did a nice book on challenges facing universities a few years back, asking some good questions and probing about what might be some interesting answers.  Here's a review of it (I don't want to post to the Amazon site for the book, but I can't find a publisher's site for it either).

But do not take your eyes off the main factor here.  The main factor here--the overwhelming fact of our time--is the decision, made in the 1970s but gathering steam ever since, by one political party to become the party of white resentment and defensiveness.  For almost my entire lifetime, there's been a feedback loop between white nationalism and the GOP, and while it started off fairly muted, the noise of the back and forth has become ever louder, until now it almost drowns out everything else.

A great deal of what has happened in our culture, in our society, and most definitely in our politics flows from that.