Category Archives: Economics

I continue my pursuit of back-reading with s a piece called, “A Letter to Barrack Obama,” in the September 2001 issue of Harper’s, by George McGovern. Even at the distance of less than a year, it’s a remarkable piece, well-worth reading. McGovern, who says he’s never seen a president thwarted by “the kind of narrow partisanship that has beset Obama,” offers a kind of laundry list of proposals that might help the president, “on the road to greatness.”

What’s so refreshing about McGovern’s ideas is their ambitiousness, particularly after a long season of the Republican primaries, a debate poisoned by the worst sort of reactionary small-mindedness imaginable. One moment they are debating the morality of birth control and insisting on invasive medical procedures and the next Candidate Santorum is telling Puerto Rican’s that they are welcome to statehood anytime, all they have to do is learn English.

So maybe I was reading with a bit of angry skepticism this morning when I came across, “Wanted: Dedicated Deep Thinkers,” by By Peter A. Coclanis, in the Chronicle of Higher Education. Coclanis is thinking about the so-called glut of Ph.D.’s and, perhaps in a half-ironic fashion, proposing that corporate America embrace academia’s lost children as what he calls, “CIAO, or chief intellectual-arbitrage officer,” on the model of the “CINO, or chief innovation officer.”

The CIAO would “ask new questions, identify new trends, explore new niches, expand geocultural boundaries, project forward, and remember the past.” I can’t help but see this as the same small=-mindedness that McGovern’s piece so effectively rejects. If were to really cut the U.S. military budget, McGovern argues, for example, by 300 or even 400 billions dollars a year we would still have the largest military in the world and probably the largest in history.

That’s money for expanding access to education, bullet trains, Medicaid for all. If Coclanis is interested in dealing with the problems of academia, he too should get out of the tiny ideas sandbox and start thinking at the scale of cutting the U.S. military budget by 2/3’s. Why can’t we begin investigating proposals to restore tenure, full-time employment, and academic freedom of speech? Perhaps we could do that by cutting administrative budgets by, say, 1/2…

Today’s freshmen are more focused on the financial benefits of a college education than were their counterparts four decades ago. Freshmen now are also more racially and ethnically diverse, harbor higher expectations for the college experience, and are increasingly interested in pursuing graduate degrees.

“45 Years of Survey Data Show First-Year Students’ Financial Concerns Are on the Rise,” Libby Sander

Today brings another helpful  juxtaposition or a set of juxtapositions all set against research into student attitudes done by the Cooperative Institutional Research Program at the University of California, Los Angles.  Students, this implies,  understand that education is both increasingly important and increasingly too expensive.  Interestingly, this interest in graduate programs is being met by shrinking Ph.D. programs (“Top Ph.D. Programs, Shrinking“).

It’s not surprising that the humanities are the weakest link in this chain. I suspect that many of these students would be far less concerned about their job prospects if they were not forced to go into so much debt.  I am also convinced that the so-called glut of Ph.D.’s, as Rosemary G. Feal, executive director of the MLA suggests, is less about demand and more about the dominance of adjunct and part-time positions in university employment.

Are we shaped by the market or do we shape the market? If we allow the market to dominate– letting the push of  indentured student debt and poorly paid teachers drive economic development– we get something like the current medical system. If we choose to shape the market to our own interests and desires, we could create an economy in which education is cheap and accessible and college teachers well paid and secure.

Juxtaposition is a wonderful thing and, sometimes, hints at something interesting. Here’s a set of fruitful contrasts. First is the story about the beleaguered U.I. president, Michael J. Hogan, confessing to what he calls a “communication shortfall” (“U. of Illinois President Acknowledges Communication Shortfall“). Among other things, these “shortfalls” may include asking his personal assistant, Lisa Troyer, to send faked anonymous emails “designed to sway a faculty governing body’s decisions on enrollment management.”

That’s seems a little beyond “communication problems.” Once the emails were discovered Troyer resigned and Hogan rewarded her for falling on her sword with a tenured faculty appointment. Meanwhile, over in the “Administration” section there’s a piece about proprietary school’s ongoing effort to buff up their image by changing their vocabulary (“By Any Other Name: For-Profit Colleges Watch Their Language“). Project Rose, as its called, is essentially a shift from corporate terms to traditional university terminology. It’s professional truthiness.

One helpful comment in the Hogan story points to a study called, “Narcissistic Leaders and Group Performance,” which suggests a link between an “arrogant and overly dominant” leader who’s perceived strengths actually result in communication problems.  Maybe. I’m thinking this is one of those “moral hazard” problems.  Hogan and his ilk know that there is no price on failure, beyond a temporary embarrassment. We’ll see how much he’s paid if he has to resign and who hires him next.

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 you cut back financial support for government services, the worst things work, and the worst things work the more you can claim that government doesn’t work well. The logical end of this process is dismantling, which is what is apparently being attempted at the University of Northern Iowa (“Cuts Ahead“).  This would represent a new, more profound stage in the class war facilitated by our ongoing economic problems.

It’s one thing to wonder how far the cuts will go, or to see how financial shortfalls are used to line the pockets of administrators and to undermine faculty and staff salaries.  That seems to be standard operating procedure. It’s another thing altogether to think that the ongoing fight against university labor and labor rights might go so far as to begin shutting down whole chunks of public universities.  Yet that is exactly what seems to be on the horizon.