EDITORS' CORNER
Key Takeaways
- The Conversation, an anti-Trump website, receives over $2 million annually from public universities funded by taxpayer money, with significant contributions from Indiana universities.
- The author argues that public university funding should prioritize education and workforce development rather than subsidizing partisan media platforms that do not provide societal benefits.
- Indiana taxpayers should not be responsible for funding an anti-Trump news site, especially when similar content is available for free elsewhere.
OPINION
Every year, an anti-Trump website called The Conversation receives more than $2 million from public universities, i.e. taxpayers, so it can continue to push out stories comparing Trump to Hitler.
About $80,000 per year comes from public universities I personally subsidize as an Indiana resident – Indiana University-Bloomington and Purdue University.
These universities ostensibly receive money from taxpayers for a specific purpose: to educate the next generation of Americans, but ideally the next generation of Hoosiers. They also serve to educate the public more broadly on information that benefits society and the economy. For example, Purdue is a land-grant university that also operates an extension service, providing information to the general public about farming and gardening.
On a larger scale, Indiana benefits from a trained workforce: we need engineers, teachers, and doctors trained at our public universities to ensure a growing economy as well as important public services.
Giving money to The Conversation accomplishes none of that. Instead, it provides a platform for leftist professors at these universities to distribute their ideas to “thousands” of “newsrooms” via the website’s partnership with the Associated Press. A Purdue trained engineer might one day oversee a massive roadbuilding project in the state. An IU trained doctor might one day take care of my kids when they are sick.
But it’s hard to see the public benefit to Indiana of this story from IU journalism Professor Chris Lamb (no relation): “Texas voting law builds on long legacy of racism from GOP leaders.”
Or this one from Purdue University political scientist Eric Waltenburg, suggesting the “legitimacy” of the court system could depend on its racial and sexual “diversity.”
Absolutely no one in Gary, Fort Wayne, or Terre Haute benefited from their tax dollars subsidizing this publication and the dissemination of its articles. There are benefits to these cities when Purdue trains nurses to deliver care or Indiana University trains teachers to work at a school. Those are public goods which taxpayers probably generally support because they get some benefit from it.
But Indiana taxpayers do not benefit from subsidizing an anti-Trump news site – and after all, there are plenty of anti-Trump sites out there that offer their content for free. Indiana taxpayers do not need to be on the hook for yet another one.
