Higher-ed policy by the ‘perpetually aggrieved and easily offended’

In late May, Gov. Kristi Noem sent a four-page letter to the Board of Regents, telling them to get busy and start graduating more students. In the letter, Noem noted that South Dakota’s university graduation rate is 47% while the national average is 63%. She told the regents to have South Dakota’s graduation rate up to 65% by 2028.

That seems like a reasonable goal. The rest of Noem’s letter hit on familiar, some would say worn out, topics — don’t do business with the China, ban drag shows, and make history and government courses a graduation requirement. Noem also admonished regents to remove any barriers that keep students from exercising their right to free speech.

One of Noem’s edicts was banning “preferred pronouns.” Well, if you prefer to pick your own pronoun, the governor’s policy hardly enhances your right to free speech. The same goes for banning drag shows. She’s all for free speech, just don’t pick dressing in drag as your preferred way of expressing yourself. She doesn’t seem to realize that it’s impossible to mandate what you want to see or hear if you’re really a champion of free speech.

Noem criticizes universities, issues series of ‘challenges’

Her instructions to the regents on the topic of drag shows notes that the topic may be debated in classrooms but shouldn’t be “celebrated through public performances on taxpayer-owned property at taxpayer-funded schools.” And there’s the rub. State government in South Dakota has been turning its back on higher education for years. With fewer and fewer state dollars funneled into our universities, the responsibility for funding education has fallen to students through higher tuition and fees. Since they pay most of the costs, maybe the students are the ones who should be making policies concerning personal pronouns and drag shows.

University building projects, for which a university has raised all the funds, still need to be endorsed by the Legislature. It has gotten to the point in Pierre where there is a small but consistent GOP minority, often part of what the Senate Republican Leader refers to as “wackadoodles,” who vote against each of those projects. If they can’t even get behind higher education when the universities themselves raise all the money for their projects, it’s probably not worth betting on them ever voting for increasing state funding to ease the burden on students.

Tucked away toward the end of Noem’s letter was one of its highlights: she announced the institution of a “whistleblower hotline.” In an effort to increase “transparency” and “accountability,” the hotline will allow callers to point out when the universities aren’t living up to Noem’s standards. Those calls are important to her as they will “guide policy decisions moving forward.”

So that’s what it has come to: Higher education policy decisions will be made based on the comments of the perpetually aggrieved and the easily offended. What could possibly go wrong?

In the letter, Noem makes the case that it is her duty to “protect the people of South Dakota, ensure that their tax burden remains low, and spend those tax dollars wisely.” That was likely also her role in 2019 when she started her first term as governor. Did the graduation rate suddenly plunge during her first four years in office? Why wait until now to expect more of the Board of Regents and make those expectations known in such a public way?

It’s easy to suspect that the bulk of the letter — dumping personal pronouns, making history and government courses a graduation requirement, prohibiting drag shows and setting up a whistleblower hotline — will make for pretty good talking points on the Fox News programs Noem frequents.

Let’s hope Noem really wants to improve higher education. Though it’s hard to believe that dumping personal pronouns is going to do much to spark an increase in graduation rates. Maybe all of this is timed to help the governor burnish her conservative credentials before making a move in the Republican primary.