The knucklehead agenda: GOP leaders engineer pillaging of Kansas universities

Former ESU president Ken Hush, left, appears as a member of the Kappa Sigma fraternity in the 1981-82 yearbook, while House Speaker Dan Hawkins appears as a Kappa Sigma member in the 1982-83 yearbook. (Katelynn Donnelly illustration for Kansas Reflector)

So, Ken Hush, we meet again.

Hush stripped Emporia State University for parts, firing tenured faculty and overseeing an exodus of students. He thankfully departed at the end of 2025, with the Board of Regents hiring an experienced university administrator to replace him. Hush, it must be noted, had no advanced degrees or experience in running a college.

Kansas legislative leaders looked at the smoldering crater of ESU and decided: We want that for all Kansas schools.

I’ll grant Hush this: He can instantly identify $50,000 of excess spending.

His consulting salary.

It’s difficult to look at Hush’s hiring, along with budget committee chatter, and not come to a dreary conclusion: Hawkins, Senate President Ty Masterson and their allies in legislative leadership mean to kneecap higher education in Kansas. In the process, they hope to leave state universities weaker and poorer and their students dumber.

There are politically practical reasons for this. College towns like Lawrence and Manhattan routinely vote for Democrats. Even college towns like Pittsburg and Hays look less red than their surrounding areas. The two main parties have separated along educational lines, and healthy universities threaten Republican leaders’ political project.

If too many people go to Kansas universities, too many Democrats will be elected. So Masterson, Hawkins and their ilk mean to destroy universities to preserve their political power.

Call it the knucklehead agenda.

I must make myself clear early in this column. I don’t believe that all or even most Republicans subscribe to that approach. I don’t believe that all or even most Republicans want such policy outcomes.They’re not knuckleheads, and they don’t want anyone else to be a knucklehead either.

I am instead highlighting a small number of powerful Kansas Republicans who serve in the Legislature. Masterson and Hawkins are among them, as are allies who chair or sit on key committees.

These Republicans, as we have seen repeatedly over the past several years, have priorities more in line with national conservative news media and President Donald Trump‘s administration then any traditional form of Kansas Republicanism.

They’re the ones who wanted to redistrict to push out U.S. Rep. Sharice Davids. And they’re the ones who want to either destroy or remake universities into rightwing propaganda mills.

In Texas, legislators have barred a swath of subjects from even being taught. Texas A&M University informed a professor this month that he cannot teach Plato. Why? The ancient Greek’s writings don’t match officials’ ideas about race and gender.

So no, conservative ideologues don’t want to restore classical education. They want to preserve their antediluvian political project.

Attempts to follow a similar playbook in Emporia didn’t work either. Enrollment dropped for several years (it rebounded slightly in 2025), and the university is handing out record scholarships to entice students. Special giveaways from the Legislature kept the whole enterprise from collapsing. To reiterate: Emporia State hasn’t saved money. It has benefited from ideological largesse.

This is happening. It is real. Universities will be targeted and brought to heel. Republican politicians want to ensure that the next generation of college graduates — if they graduate at all — will quickly and uncomplainingly administer the Gilded Age fantasies of our billionaire class.

No one who runs a university in Kansas can say what I just wrote. No high-ranking Democrat in the House or Senate can say it either. In either case, they can’t talk about what’s going on because Hawkins and Masterson and their ilk will punish them for doing so. Look at what happened after Democratic Rep. Ford Carr raised concerns about racism last year.

But I’m not an elected official, and I’m not a university administrator. I’m just putting down what I see.

Beyond students, the greatest victims in this all are principled and courageous conservatives. Public thinkers such as William F. Buckley Jr. and Norman Podhoretz, George Will and Thomas Sowell, believed in the superiority of their ideas without the necessity of silencing opposing views. They engaged in persuasion and public debate.

Modern conservative leaders in Kansas no longer believe in such values. They don’t want discussion or compromise. They want to accumulate power, and they want to deploy that power against political enemies.

If it means creating a state full of knuckleheads, so be it. They already control of most of the Statehouse.

Clay Wirestone is Kansas Reflector opinion editor. Through its opinion section, Kansas Reflector works to amplify the voices of people who are affected by public policies or excluded from public debate. Find information, including how to submit your own commentary, here.