WATCH: Meet the senatorial candidate running against Critical Race Theory
Pukita says Critical Race Theory is 'a Marxist construct' that should be kept out of schools.
He believes in removing government from higher education as a means to reduce the cost of college and improve workforce readiness.
Mark Pukita, a Senate candidate and entrepreneur from Ohio, sat down with Campus Reform to discuss his vision for higher education.
Pukita is running for Senate on a platform that involves opposing Critical Race Theory and reducing the role of government in higher education.
“We need to get CRT out of education and out of government…it’s a Marxist construct, if you understand the history of it,” Pukita said.
He is concerned about how Critical Race Theory, which began on college campuses, is infiltrating every level of education. He said, “It’s awful what they’re doing to our kids in terms of dividing them by color.”
He successfully lobbied the Ohio Board of Education to repeal Resolution 20, a statement of values that required all state education employees to undergo implicit bias training.
[RELATED: 5 Big Questions for Ed Yingling, co-founder of the Alumni Free Speech Alliance]
When it comes to student debt, Pukita said that colleges bear some responsibility for offering programs that offer an insufficient return on students’ investments.
“I’d be all for paying [student debt] off with money from the universities and the colleges that educated those students,” he said. “I’m not for paying it off with government money or forgiving it and having taxpayers take it in the chops for that, just absolutely not.”
Much like Prof. Ben Ginsberg, a Johns Hopkins University professor who spoke with Campus Reform recently, Pukita believes that student debt relief should come from colleges that funneled students through low-quality programs.
Pukita said that students who are in debt due to a poor education “should be going back to the schools that gave them that substandard education and be requesting a refund that they can use to pay off their student loans.”
[RELATED: 5 Big Questions for Professor Ben Ginsberg]
Pukita sees the free market as a solution to both the high cost and low value that plagues many college programs.
He said that politics has destroyed much of the value that is supposed to come with a college education:
“Kids are graduating from college or university, and they have no skills that are valuable in the market. We’re producing the best-educated fast food and retail employees of all time, and that’s because the government is involved and politics is involved.”
When government gets out of the way, Pukita said, students will benefit from stronger academic programs and lower costs.
“We need to let the free market and capitalism set the price of education,” he said.
Follow the interviewer on Twitter: @AngelaLMorabito
