I am always fascinated by the way the ruling class of academia, or its professional mouthpiece, the ACTA, manages to both invert common sense and to slyly inject a “market solution” into almost any debate without actually calling it a market solution. Orwell couldn’t have described it better. This week, in “Message to Senator Durbin: Level the Playing Field”  the ACTA asks the public universities to model themselves after Phoenix.

This isn’t a call for “fairness” in any sense, and it’s a proposal that would un-level the playing field in the same fashion that the public schools have been made profoundly inequitable through standardized testing, on the one hand, and by undermining the creative role of teachers, on the other. It…

I heard a story about the Internet Center for Corruption Research this morning (on NPR, I think) and I am starting to think that corruption really should be some sort of subcategory in the academic study of contemporary U.S. universities. On Monday, I listed recent examples from Illinois, but today I find even more stories from elsewhere; these involve institutionalized form of corruption but perhaps individual corruption as well.

Administrators at Harvard managed to report both a budget shortfall requiring program and a million or so in bonuses for the “two Cadillacs” crowd. (“Bonuses and Furloughs“).  Other reports note the ongoing move to shift the cost of college to the individual (“Colleges Increasingly Dependent on Tuition, U.S. Study Shows“) and,…

In my mostly half serious quest to found a new academic discipline called ‘corruption studies’ I’d like to draw on the study of racial intolerance and white supremacy, which distinguishes between run of the mill individual racism and institutionalize racism. A similar distinction can be made between corrupt people in academia– administrative supremacists, as it were– and institutionalized corruption. Each is in the news in Illinois this week.

The institutionalized corruption in question starts with the ongoing rise in salaries of administrators despite the ongoing funding crisis of higher education and the economic slow-down. While Rome burns, it seems, administrators are only willing to slow down their greed to a few points below inflation (“Salaries Rise for Senior Administrators…

It seems to be a week for market worshipers in academia. In “To Fix Student Lending, Rethink the Concept,” it’s two very conservative economists telling us, once again, that the market  has failed and so the solution is, well, the market. Or maybe the implicit argument is that the market only failed because of government interference and if you got rid of that interference then the market will work.  Or maybe it failed due to a lack of information or….

Authors  Gillen and Vedder begin by setting aside the most basic argument in any discussion of debt, forgiveness, (not a very sexy economic word) as if it had no real place in student debt discussions.  That’s how we know that we are going to hear an argument designed…

“There will always be some leaders who choose to manage for the short term … particularly when they hold the highly liquid equity stakes that the leadership of private-sector institutions sometimes receive as part of their compensation. This isn’t a theoretical issue; it has happened.”

Andrew Rossen, quoted in ‘Change.edu’ and the Problem With For-Profits by Robert M. Shireman

I work in the proprietary sector, and I think that Rossen is correct. You cannot offer huge salaries and bonuses for short=term profitability and expect executives and managers to think long-term. In such a situation, as Shireman rightly points out, “The temptations to do ill are unrelenting.” Interestingly, Shireman calls Rosen’s ideas both “refreshingly honest” and “empty.” It’s hard to disagree.

What I don’t…

As someone who works in the for-profit higher education, I am often dismayed at what happens in my little corner of the economy. I think our industry emerged in an economic culture that was far too unregulated and far too greedy. I think we need more regulation and I think that our industry doesn’t need to be so narrowly focused on short-term profits. We share all the problems of modern U.S. capitalism, in other words.

I am also often dismayed at the way problems in the for-profit sector seem to be used as cover for the more profound problems in the public sector.  These problems are dwarfed by the exploitation of adjunct labor, bloated  administrative salaries, the weakening of tenure, the…