Left wing activists often hurt the very people they claim to help. The victims are left voiceless and ignored — inconvenient collateral damage. They suffer under the radar, unnoticed in the wake of woke do-gooders cheered by the press. That’s what happened recently to students and more than 200 employees when the Colorado Attorney General’s Office unfairly targeted CollegeAmerica, a career college in Colorado that had served working adults, single mothers and minority students since 1964.
Non-traditional career schools like CollegeAmerica serve student populations that the traditional academia leaves behind. Students who need a more practical, career-focused education than a four-year liberal arts degree have often had to turn to private, for-profit schools willing to serve that need. It’s a valid choice and people should be free to make it.
But, a mixture of leftist hatred for free markets and self-interest in running a protection racket for their allies in traditional academia has driven a cadre of activists to relentlessly target career colleges for more than a decade. The Obama Administration and former Sen. Tom Harkin (D-IA) got caught years ago playing footsie with short sellers prodding the government to crack down on education companies while seeking to personally profit from the damage.
The Justice Department investigated an Obama Education Department official for sharing insider information about the rule-making with left-wing advocacy groups working with short interests on Wall Street. Despite outrage from across the political spectrum, no one was ever charged.
The bottom line is that there is a growing gap in the United States between the elites and the rest of the country. Elite institutions are increasingly out of touch with regular folks — and with reality. Big legacy media, big tech, big government and big academia use their power to insulate themselves while the consequences of their broken, collectivist ideology fall on others.
In the case of CollegeAmerica, however, the school was operated by a nonprofit organization, the Center for Excellence in Higher Education (CEHE). Still, CEHE is being targeted by the left for two reasons: (1) it had previously operated for-profit schools, and (2) it refused to bend the knee to government overreach in the seven years since the Colorado Attorney General’s office falsely alleged that CollegeAmerica’s ads violated state consumer protection laws.
The lawyer who brought the case for the state AG’s office was Libby DeBlasio Webster. Turns out she worked on the controversial Obama-era crackdown on for-profit schools, serving on a rule-making panel at the time.
So, perhaps the AG’s office was playing politics here given how weak the case was on the merits. It didn’t matter to the AG’s office that accreditors and federal regulators had reviewed CollegeAmerica’s ads in advance. It didn’t matter that virtually every school in Colorado cited the very same Bureau of Labor Statistics data about the value of post-secondary degrees that the State claimed was misleading.
It didn’t matter that CollegeAmerica graduated students at nearly twice the rate of comparable community colleges and had positive reviews from its students. What mattered was pure political power.
When faced with endless, costly lawsuits from political activists masquerading as public servants, the “smart” thing to do is cut your losses, take your medicine and settle — even if you did nothing wrong. The state AG’s office has the resources and time to smear the reputations of people who happen to fall on the wrong side of its politics. The wheels of justice grind slowly, and in the time it takes to vindicate yourself, it’s usually too late.
CEHE fought back anyway and paid the price. Despite winning on an initial preliminary injunction ruling, eventually a bench trial by a different judge with no jury resulted in a ruling against CEHE that is still under appeal. But, the damage was done, forcing CollegeAmerica to shut down.
Others in Colorado are already calling for more transparency given how the judge delayed resolving the case for so long. The actions of the court in the CollegeAmerica case seemingly confirm much of the recent coverage of broader concerns about misconduct in the Colorado judiciary. The controversy comes amid other “alarming” cover-up allegations and a growing “crisis in confidence” in the Colorado judiciary. Now, this case adds incompetence and negligence to those concerns.
Perhaps the state AG’s office deserves some scrutiny as well. Was the office working with or at the urging of the D.C. activists behind the controversial Obama-Harkin efforts from years ago? Given that the endless litigation forced CollegeAmerica to shut down, why is the AG still trying to go after CEHE and its other schools, which are completely unrelated to the case? One wonders what a review of all the AG office’s communications with outside interest groups would show if someone let in some sunshine.
By using the courts to hound a private, nonprofit school out of existence, the AG’s office did nothing noble and protected no one. It just killed good jobs in Colorado and crushed the efforts of the students trying to better themselves. The school they chose was ripped out from under them by a Kafkaesque system that allowed an ideological agenda to harm people in the name of helping them.
Ian Prior is the CEO of Headwaters Media and Former Principal Deputy Director of Public Affairs at the Department of Justice.