If people spend other people’s money on other people, they are not careful about the amount of money they spend, nor are they careful about what they spend it on. That is government.

“Evidence of Absence,” Donald Rumsfeld, Harpers, May 2011

I am always behind on my reading– unemployment, if nothing else, may fix that– and this morning I found this example of one of what Rumsfeld calls his  intellectual “snowflakes.” As Rumsfeld writes elsewhere in the same piece, “Before the thugs, go the liars.” Even if we disagree about how the money is spent, an ethical democratic government spends, by definition, our money on ourselves. The thuggery that follows this Rumsfeldian lie continues.

It always begins with de-funding: the more…

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…

Over the last three or four decades the growing influence of neoliberalism– in brief, the irrational worship of markets– has steadily shifted the costs of education away from the collective– in the U.S., federal or state governments– and towards students and families in the form of student loans. As that loan burden nears a trillion dollars, you’d think that we’d hear increasing calls to shift the costs of college back where it belongs, with the collective.

Despite some calls for a mass forgiveness of student debt, this hasn’t happened. Instead, the current status quo has become so naturalized that even the most “enlightened” seeming propositions are too often nothing more than repetitions of the economic orthodoxy’s insistence that “full market transparency” will…