The Assault on American Higher Education

All of us academics -- full-time or part-time faculty -- are up against significant hostility towards higher education these days from:

1) those conservatives, if one can use that word without defiling it, who try to block academic reports of basic facts that belie their photo op con games.

2) a corporatized model of education that is running amuck in this country. Other nations simply do not run their universities and colleges as corporations with bottom line dominance of key decisions. Some are state run. Others are faculty run (e.g. Oxbridge, or at least when I was there). Only here have business 'efficiencies' that are not at all efficient been applied to public services such as medicine and education. And they are making an horrendous mess of things that are critically necessary for the functioning of any modern society.

One sees the madness in both these areas. The U.S. has the most expensive medical delivery system per capita of any developed nation and yet is cruelly excluding large proportions of those who need and deserve medical care and now bankrupting others forced to seek emergency care without proper insurance coverage.

Our universities for their part -- both private and public -- seem bent on massive capital spending programs -- I see this first hand both at Columbia from which I have a degree and at Brooklyn College, CUNY, where I teach. Columbia wants to build precisely where poor people live and work. Brooklyn is spending many millions (e.g. $70 million for a library re-do several years ago and currently comparable to replace a 1960s building with a new one when it can't keep its elevators running, its libraries open, provide full-time faculty for teaching its students, and is boosting its tuitions to pay minimal faculty salaries and benefits). Contractors and real estate developers are making out like bandits while U.S. higher education withers on the vine. State bonds in a state with real financial problems despite its massive wealth pay for construction; faculty and students pay for the educational process -- teaching -- with personal loans and skimping to get by as best we can.

I began teaching as full-time faculty member in a fine college with the option there to finish my dissertation and get on with my own learning both as to how to teach and in my fields of scholarly interest. Our academic world has since been co-opted and we must all fight back against the obvious -- both in our interest and in the interest of our wider community. It looks to me as though neo-conservativism these days is verging towards neo fascism. Hopefully a wised up public and some criminal indictments (e.g. the "Hammer") will nip this trend in the bud. But we are living in perilous times with the culture wars simmering in most dangerous and threatening ways. And our present national leadership is both totally incompetent to protect us from real terror attacks (e.g. dirty bombs and the like that are the all too likely next step in escalation) and is doing everything in its incompetent way to throw gasoline on the simmering fires. Pardon the metaphor. I am deadly serious as one who has lived through 3 previous and now a fourth brutal war.
--
"A war is just if there is no alternative, and the resort
to arms is legitimate if they represent your last hope." (Livy)
--
Ed Kent 718-951-5324 (voice mail only) [blind copies]
--

http://groups.yahoo.com/group/CollegeConversation

http://groups.yahoo.com/group/PeaceEfforts

http://groups.yahoo.com/group/EndingPoverty

http://groups.yahoo.com/group/440neighborhood

http://groups.yahoo.com/group/StudentConcerns

http://groups.yahoo.com/group/AcademicFreedom

http://groups.yahoo.com/group/PrivacyRights

http://BlogByEdKent.blogspot.com/

http://www.bloggernews.net/blognews.asp