Category Archives: Writing

It’s unfair to that wonderful, giant bird, but I can’t help but think that it may well be the best metaphor for how too many academics think about a college education. A case in point is this piece (which relies heavily on administrators, not surprisingly) about the value of a college education. It sounds very progressive and reasonable, on first reading:

As rising college costs have loaded more and more debt onto the backs of Americans, the return-on-investment conversation seems inevitable—­and perhaps prudent. But a single-minded focus on money pays little heed to one of the best aspects of the American higher-education system: its skill at developing curious, critical-thinking, culturally aware people. Those qualities may have greater financial rewards than critics realize.

“How to Assess the Real Payoff of a College Degree,” Scott Carlson

The second sentence, about the “single-minded focus on money,” has no subject. Who is it, exactly, that is so concerned with money? The administrators who have raised tuition and their own salaries so often? The government regulators who want to find a way to rein them in and keep education affordable? Or the parents and students who are faced with huge inescapable debts exempt from bankruptcy laws?

I think that college should have broader purposes. I also think that work, even in the most narrowly defined sense, has broader purposes and draws on the so-called liberal arts skills much more than many have been willing to concede. The problem I have with this argument is that it ignores reality, especially the reality of how administrative actions have contributed to the problems they bemoan. They put money first, before anyone else did.

Doug Henwood summarizes the price of “business-oriented” administration: student debt has almost completely negated the income boost a degree use to confer. In fact, debt-ridden college students no longer earn more than their non-degree counterparts, once you subtract debt payments. Even more, Henwood says, this debt “is harming the broad economy, and will continue to for years to come.” It’s not just Wall Street that made the mess.

Norman Markowitz has a blog post that outlines the possibility that the Boston Marathon bombing may be more blow-back from U.S. imperialism. He gives the U.S. government some credit for a dovish response:

…the Obama administration deserves a good deal of credit for not doing with the Bush administration most certainly would have–fan the flames of hysteria to advance their political agenda, put the nation on full alert, point to various foreign powers and connections and make threats of major military action. Terrorism is a police matter first and foremost and as of now, as I am writing, with one of the killers dead and the other being hunted in an area of Boston where hopefully he will be captured, the police have done a good job.

“some quick thoughts about the Boston Marathon Atrocity by Norman Markowitz“

In a strictly technical sense, the police did well; one bomber dead and, more importantly, one alive and in custody. That means that there’s some chance that we will learn something about the motivations behind the crime and so on. We need all the information we can get. Markowitz also points out the obvious, that this should feed into the gun safety debate as yet another example of how we are becoming an armed and dangerous society.

What bother’s me most about this sort of terrorism is the way it reinforces the worst aspects of political culture, feeding the romance of armed resistance on both the so-called pro-gun NRA-right domestically and the various quasi-nationalist movements overseas. (They are not so different.) One side will see yet another reason to buy a gun, another will see that there are weak spots in the U.S. imperial armor, despite years of reinforcement.

What we don’t have, at least in the mass-media, is a sustained critique of both positions rooted in the long history of non-violent social struggle here and around the world. It’s simply idiotic to claim, as the right so often does, that the only way to “fight” our government is with guns. In the U.S. and around the world we have better revolutionary tools: the ballet and the union and the demonstration. We fight democratically to build democracy.

The idea of armed struggle against U.S. imperialism ought to be rejected just as strongly, for all the reasons that history has shown it does not work. On the other hand, non-violent struggle has produced many victories from India to the U.S. to the Philippines to Myanmar to Tunisia and Egypt. This is the political romance we ought to be promoting, here as much as elsewhere, among all of those unemployed and disillusioned boys and young men.