Baumgartner aims to push out ‘woke stuff’ from higher education – The Daily Evergreen

U.S. Rep. Michael Baumgartner, R-Spokane, said colleges and universities across the nation are dealing with what he calls administrative bloat and a protesting student body. WSU is an exception, he says.

“By and large, the kind of challenges seen at WSU are nowhere near what you see in other college campuses, and some of the ones where they really are abrasive,” the freshman congressman said in an interview with The Daily Evergreen. “WSU in general has always had, I think, much more tolerance for different viewpoints here on this campus.”

That extends to region in general.

“WSU has always been a very, very diverse place and just because of its role as a major tier one research institution. And so, and it’s always, I think just the culture of eastern Washington has always been a pretty tolerant place and people are able to get here and kind of get along.”

Baumgartner, who sits on the House committee on Education and the Workforce and is vice chair of subcommittee on Higher Education and Workforce Development, said WSU lacks much of the larger protests other colleges saw, especially after the Oct. 7 Hamas attacks.

“We’ve done a lot of hearings on some anti-Semitism on college campuses and what some Jewish students have gone through, and there hasn’t been that kind of activity here,” he said.

In terms of the classes on diversity such as gender studies, Baumgartner says there are few at WSU.

“I think, like, the explosion that you saw, I mean, like the gender studies, ethnic studies, these sorts of things, I think that there’s been way too many public resources put into those degrees,” he said. “It shouldn’t be for political purposes or kind of social engineering or mobilization.”

“Woke stuff” is something he is trying to push out of higher education in general, he wants degrees to “actually value to them.”

“There’s a wide range of value of scholastic interests and people to study, but it should be like true academic inquiry,” he said.

Baumgartner said those programs should exist, but the funding responsibility should not fall on the federal government.

“It’s not, ‘it shouldn’t be done.’ I mean, if you want to, those academic degrees, they have value, but when they become an end unto themselves in sort of a self-perpetuating machine where they live in this little world,” he said. “And then when they come part of like a left-wing political project that exists.”

Baumgartner’s connection to WSU, and his experiences in the Washington state legislature color his role in the House, especially informing his thoughts on higher education affordability.

“The big thing that we’ve tried to do at the federal government level is trying to deal with this debt burden of students and the way we’re trying to deal with that is actually putting downward pressure on universities,” Baumgartner said.

The reduction of these federal loans and financial aid programs like the Pell grant serve to, as Baumgartner said, “deflate the balloon.” He attributed the $40 trillion of national debt, in part, to excessive loan availability.

“The reality is that all this loan money didn’t actually go for the benefit of students, it went to subsidize all this growth of the universities,” Baumgartner said.

Such growth includes student facilities, expanded administrative roles and other modern luxuries.

“We didn’t have two immaculate indoor gyms when I went here and students getting $7 Starbucks twice a day was not a thing when I went here, so students have had all this easy access to loans,” Baumgartner said. “A lot of them, some, not all, but some students themselves have lived much more expensive lifestyles than they have because of the expansion of the loan.”

The danger with loan distribution, according to Baumgartner, is the willingness of students to take on excessive debt.

“The problem with an eighteen-year-old is they don’t know the difference between six hundred dollars in debt and sixty thousand dollars in debt,” he said.

Last year, 37% of WSU students received Pell grant awards, which is an 8% jump from 2020. The exorbitant cost of higher education, which continues to grow the maximum 3% every year, can be attributed to diversified state spending, instead of focusing spending on education.

“What happened in higher education was when states started expanding at the state level into other priorities of spending, particularly in Democratic states, they preferred expansive health care or spending on illegal immigrants or pay increases for state employees,” Baumgartner said. “They started cutting back the support they provided to in-state tuition, so instead of being a 70/30 split where it was affordable, they reversed that.”

The responsibility is now, according to Baumgartner, on the universities to reduce “administrative bloat.”

“That’s why we’re reducing some of the available loans to put more pressure on universities,” he said.

Baumgartner said he speaks to WSU President Betsy Cantwell often, saying their relationship is “good.” He said the conversations with her have been mostly about athletics and where the university is headed.

“We talk fairly frequently,” he said. “I’ve been really impressed with her.”

The Department of Justice last week sued four states, including Washington, for providing in-state tuition to undocumented immigrants. The lawsuit named WSU.

Baumgartner said he has not had any communication as of last week with WSU President Betsy Cantwell. He says the state of Washington is to blame for the suit.

“When states provide benefits to people who enter the country in a non-lawful manner, then it ends up becoming a magnet for increased illegal immigration,” he said.