I can’t decide if the ongoing stories about coaches and administrative salaries (“From the Sideline to the Bottom Line“) are going to have a Lenny Bruce effect– if you repeat something often enough it looses all power to shock– or an “occupy” effect of  driving protest by emphasizing just how profoundly greed shapes what are supposed to be institutions devoted to public service.

It makes me wonder if we ought to be advocating for Corruption Studies as a new form of cultural studies;  here, we would be studying one of its main branches, the University Sports Division. I think that Corruption Studies would begin with a discussion of the history of the ongoing rise of tuition and fees on the one hand,…

Another end of the year piece– this time in the Washington Post (“Guest post: Eight thoughts on higher education in 2012,” Daniel de Vise)–decrying the state of Higher Education in the U.S. and calling for reform, if in a very vague fashion. The main point seems to be that “we” (meaning the administrators in control of universities) need to think differently. I don’t know how these guys avoiding saying “outside the box.”

In this piece– written from deep within the reality distortion field–everyone is doing their best, gosh darn, except that there are these “conditions” that seem to be causing so much trouble.  We (those administrators again) can only raise tuition so far, for example, because, well, there’s a “practical ceiling”– e.g. people run out…

It’s always good to see an end of the year piece in the Chronicle (“The Crisis of the Public University” by Nancy Scheper-Hughes) acknowledging the ongoing realities of higher education as well as its current crises.  Scheper-Hughes offers a succinct outline of  recent history and its impact on the public university system with one glaring and telling exception: she underplays the complacency of tenured and tenure track faculty.

It’s one thing to support the Occupy movement and to decry the invasion of consumerism into the university and the rising costs of education and expanding student debt. That’s the sort of thing you might expect, especially in California.  We can only hope that this sort of resistance spreads elsewhere in the United States. It’s also…

Continental European capitalism, which combines generous health and social benefits with reasonable working hours, long vacation periods, early retirement, and relatively equal income distributions, would seem to have everything to recommend it – except sustainability.

“Is Modern Capitalism Sustainable“– Kenneth Rogoff

Mike Konczal assembles some striking quotes from Federal Reserve transcripts showing how obsessed the monetary overlords are with keeping wages down. I won’t recycle any of the quotes—check out his post for the full flavor.

“The Fed and the Class Struggle” — Doug Henwood

Here’s an juxtaposition that might be used to teach critical thinking. The contrast between these two ways of seeing the economy isn’t simply a matter of right and wrong, yes and no, or even “subject positions,” although that…

It’s always interesting when educators or administrators get up on their high horse and begin complaining that academia needs to “re-tool for the 21st century” (to cite the cliché). It’s interesting because if you succeed at a university and get tenure it is, in some sense, because you help the institution keep up the status quo. It’s an unavoidable contradiction, to use the Marxist term.

That’s on reason that I find most of the criticism about my industry unpersuasive: the system of exploitation created in the public sector of higher education  is far more extensive and long-lived than what the for-profits have created. There’s not a non-profit problem here and a for profit problem there; there’s a labor and an education problem throughout. The non-profits…

There you have it. A concise summary of what’s wrong with present corporately driven education change: Decisions are being made by individuals who lack perspective and aren’t really accountable.

Those decisions are shaped not by knowledge or understanding of educating, but by ideology, politics, hubris, greed, ignorance, the conventional wisdom, and various combinations thereof. And then they’re sold to the public by the rich and powerful ( Marion Brady, “When an adult took standardized tests forced on kids“).

The economist Doug Henwood has long contended that the problem with the U.S. economy now isn’t just the ordinary cyclical ills of capitalism but a deeper malaise rooted in a decadent ruling class. It’s decadent…