Trustee Truthiness

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I find this sentence, from the ACTA’s official blog, fascinating: “Our curricular study, www.whatwilltheylearn.com, documents that less than five percent of schools insist their students even study economics, let alone free markets.” This claim is a part of a larger argument that says, roughly, if you can’t directly prove something called “donor intent” then you can’t complain that private foundations and donors can have an ill effect on academia.

More specifically, Cary Nelson, president of the AAUP, can’t complain about the detrimental influence of the Koch brothers, and certainly can’t complain about the Kochs’ ongoing attempt to promote anti-scientific, and anti-intellectual ideas about everything from global warming to health care. The ACTA’s argument is simple. Just because the Kochs’ continually work at poisoning reasoned debate doesn’t mean they will try to do the same through targeted donations in academia.

It’s trustee truthfulness at it’s very best and it’s not too far from the specious logic– another favorite of the Koch brothers and their allies– that says that creationism and evolution are two “competing theories” that should be given equal time in the classroom. The tell-tale ideological marker is the phrase, “much less free markets.” I think it would be great if economics were taught more often and that would have to include discussions of markets. It would also debunk the notion of a “free market.”

Posted in: Writing

Whitewashed History

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I have to agree with the letter writer who complained that the Chronicle of Higher Education ought to cover recent events in Arizona more thoroughly (“Controversial Arizona Law Deserves Scholars’ Attention“). A new law, HB 2281, represents the cutting edge in the long-expressed desire of the right-wing to eliminate ethic studies, as a part of their larger drive to end diversity programs in education. It’s another example of the irrationality of white supremacy, its profound fear that if it does not fully assimilate the other, its own unique identity will disappear.

In Arizona, the formula is very simple: either the people who are ethnically Mexican– most are not recent immigrants, of course–drop their own language and culture and adopt European American (“white”) cultural traditions and the English language or European American culture– and the English language–will be lost forever, at least on the American continent. White culture, this assumes, isn’t strong enough to co-exist with other cultures. Ethnic studies are designed to remedy this profound paranoia about the danger implicit in other cultures.

It’s not automatic or necessarily easy, but multiple cultures can and do co-exist peacefully.The “white” paranoia, too, is rooted in a profound misunderstanding of American history that downplays if not ignores the dynamics of multiple cultures that has shaped U.S. history, for good and ill, from the central role of slavery in the early U.S. economy to the Indian genocide to the Civil Rights movement to La Raza. H.B. 2281 is trying to create a dangerous institutionalized amnesia, the very opposite of what it means to be educated.

Posted in: Economics, Language, Online Places, Professional, Writing

Lots of Sound, Not So Much Fury

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I continue to struggle to try to understand what is really going on in the efforts to at least begin to regulate the for-profit sector in a reasonable way. We need strong regulations if we are going to be able get beyond the stereotype of being the used car salespeople of the higher education system. Too much of this energy seems misdirected. This sentence, for example, (from “Lawmakers hear conflicting reports on for-profit colleges“) sounds plausible even if you remove the word “for profit” : “…colleges may be using unethical recruitment practices and charging too much for degrees while failing to prepare students for jobs.”

I don’t think all schools use unethical recruiting methods, but recruiting abuses, in legacy admissions and sports, to name only two examples, are not uncommon in the public system. The promise of a job, often unsupported by any evidence, has long been a staple of higher education. The for-profits didn’t do anything new, they simply built on what the system had long accepted as common practice. No real regulatory agency is watching recruitment; the public schools can raise tuition as high as they want. No one’s watching that, either. Student debt has long been an endemic problem in a system so reliant on loans and not grants.

We need recruitment regulations that will cover all sorts of potential abuses in all schools, private to public, from athletic bribes, to high pressure sales techniques, to legacy admissions and the lack of diversity. We need a system of public subsidy– and a generous loan forgiveness program– to eliminate student debt. Schools that receive public money should not be able to waste so much of it on administrative salaries and expensive marketing programs. We need some sort of public discussion about the purposes of higher education and the limits of capitalism. No school should be able to promise the jobs that only public policy can deliver.

Posted in: Economics, Professional, Writing