Over the past 25 years, since Newt Gingrich helped Republicans reclaim the gavel in the House of Representatives, Americans have become more politically polarized. Not only do members of one party view the other party as wrong, but they more frequently view them as a “threat to the nation’s well-being.” Americans don’t trust the other side, and more and more they mistrust institutions too, including the media and higher education.

Polls have shown that confidence in higher education, overall, has decreased in the past few years. A Pew Research Center survey found that 61 percent of Americans are worried about the path America’s colleges and universities are on. Democrats think that the cost of tuition is too high and, to a much lesser extent, that students are not getting the skills they need for the workplace. But Republicans overwhelmingly hold negative views of the sector; 73 percent thought higher education was going in the wrong direction, as opposed to 52 percent of Democrats. A 2018 Gallup poll found that only 39 percent of Republicans expressed a “great deal” or “quite a lot” of confidence in the sector, down 17 percentage points from 2015.

For many Republicans, mistrust of Democrats and mistrust of institutions collide when it comes to higher education, because they see colleges and universities as having a liberal bent. They point to surveys showing that college leadership leans liberal, and that liberal professors outnumber conservative ones on campuses.

The latest corroboration for some conservatives was Harvard’s decision to rescind admission to Kyle Kashuv, a Parkland survivor and conservative activist, because of racist messages he sent via Google Docs while in high school. For some, this drove home the message that liberals, and universities, practice selective forgiveness, allowing for the former sins of liberal institutions and people (see: Harvard University’s own past) but not doing the same for conservatives.

Read: Kyle Kashuv becomes a symbol to conservatives who say the left can’t forgive

It’s been an open question for some time whether this partisan mistrust would translate into tangible, monetary penalties for higher education. One answer came last fall, when voters in Montana took to the polls to decide whether they would continue to tax themselves to support higher education. The tax, known as the six-mill levy, has been voted on once every decade since 1948, and this vote was seen as a bellwether for public sentiment on higher education. Though the measure had been passing narrowly in preceding years, voters in 2018 again decided to continue taxing themselves to support their state universities. The support was likely the result of an interesting phenomenon that occurs when the conversation is not about “higher education” as a monolith but about people’s local colleges. Even though people may feel dubious about higher education more broadly, they can see the good that their local schools do and often feel favorably toward them as a result.