Category Archives: Writing

An Open Letter to Newt Gingrich and Rick Santorum

As Catholic leaders who recognize that the moral scandals of racism and poverty remain a blemish on the American soul, we challenge our fellow Catholics Newt Gingrich and Rick Santorum to stop perpetuating ugly racial stereotypes on the campaign trail. Mr. Gingrich has frequently attacked President Obama as a “food stamp president” and claimed that African Americans are content to collect welfare benefits rather than pursue employment. Campaigning in Iowa, Mr. Santorum remarked: “I don’t want to make black people’s lives better by giving them somebody else’s money.” Labeling our nation’s first African-American president with a title that evokes the past myth of “welfare queens” and inflaming other racist caricatures is irresponsible, immoral and unworthy of political leaders.

Some presidential candidates now courting “values voters” seem to have forgotten that defending human life and dignity does not stop with protecting the unborn. We remind Mr. Gingrich and Mr. Santorum that Catholic bishops describe racism as an “intrinsic evil” and consistently defend vital government programs such as food stamps and unemployment benefits that help struggling Americans. At a time when nearly 1 in 6 Americans live in poverty, charities and the free market alone can’t address the urgent needs of our most vulnerable neighbors. And while jobseekers outnumber job openings 4-to-1, suggesting that the unemployed would rather collect benefits than work is misleading and insulting.

As the South Carolina primary approaches, we urge Mr. Gingrich, Mr. Santorum and all presidential candidates to reject the politics of racial division, refrain from offensive rhetoric and unite behind an agenda that promotes racial and economic justice.

 

This needs to be more widely seen and discussed among educators, students, and teachers. In the next year, as the presidential election gets closer, the racist rhetoric is going to grow more insistent. Just last night, Santorum refused to correct a woman claiming that Obama was a “professed Muslim” and an illegitimate president, presumably because he is not a natural-born citizen.

Republican views on education are always bleakly simple: schools, from preschool to graduate, are potentially huge sources of revenue trapped in inefficient government agencies.  If you “free” the schools from these government controls, so the market ideology says, you cut inefficiencies and lower costs while improving quality.  History tells us that things are more complicated, but it’s not surprising to find Willard Romney promoting the company line (“Romney’s support for Full Sail University raises eyebrows in higher ed“).

Even nominal monopolies  like public schools face market pressures, as my Dad use to remind me, for labor and services. You can’t take any institution “out of capitalism.”  So the market shapes everything already. It’s not whether or not the  market economy shapes an institution, it’s always about  shaping  markets through our laws and regulations. In Finland, as has been said many times, education is effective because a market has been shaped that makes teaching a well paid, relatively high status profession.

It’s expensive and unnecessary to “privatize” the public school system to sharpen market forces; it’s more effective to make teaching professionally lucrative.  The privatization of the public schools should be stopped; we can use the money we save  to focus on increasing the competitiveness of teachers. Higher education is no different: we need to change the market so that teachers are well paid and high status professionals, honest competitors to lawyers and engineers. That will improve all schools, public as well as for-profit.

This seems like an overly obvious statement, but as this chart, published by the Chronicle of Higher Education, shows, one reason the universities act like corporations seeking profits and not democratic institutions serving the public good is that corporations, in effect, pay the salaries of many university presidents.  The chart suggests that greed is endemic and that, even in education, money is a driving force.

In effect, universities are simply nodes in the interlocking directorates that knit together corporate power centers and that have helped to create the democratic and social stagnation reflected in the profound concentrations of wealth that have emerged in the U.S. in the last three or four decades. The public university system isn’t simply influenced by corporate culture, it’s an important part of corporate culture.

The last great academic myth is that the university is a bulwark against the market. In fact, the to the extent that education is a source of substantive cultural and economic power, the university is at the cutting edge of the dismantling of democratic culture.  The university is a model of U.S. capitalism: workers are  insecure and poorly paid, student/consumers pay more and are swamped in debt, and at the top, administrators get richer.