The American commitment to class mobility through education has always sketchy, despite the myths that cluster around the idea of the American Dream. There have been times that we got serious; the post WWII GI Bill is one example. The Obama administration, too, while perhaps too preoccupied with other issues, has made an effort to strengthen access and pledged to do more.

Usually, though, we are more interested in funding and promoting the already-successful than the could-be-successful. We routinely fund public schools through local school districts, so the wealthiest neighborhoods have the best schools. The top of the educational hierarchy– the Ivy league and the like– is rich beyond belief while the bottom tiers muddle along.

In so-called hard economic times the muddling quickly goes from bad to worse as the recent California cuts demonstrated. In hard times, too, American Capitalist Culture reflexively squeezes anyone less materially privileged and so restricts mobility. I wonder how much could be saved if the California administration decided that no would get paid more than $90,000 until the crisis abated?

More importantly, hard times provide an opportunity to permanently redefine institutions. Too often, this too means less access. In this case, though, the new, more restrictive ideas of access can too easily become the norm, outlasting the crisis by many years. That’s why Chancellor Daniel L. Klaich’s trial balloon, suggesting that Nevada’s community colleges restrict enrollment, is worth watching.

The recent flap over errors in the APA Style manual has pushed me into pulling a Seinfeld and coining a new term: Cubicle Sourcing. You heard it here first, the day after Thanksgiving, 2009. Cubicle Sourcing is the opposite of Crowd Sourcing, of course.

Crowd Sourcing, Wikipedia reminds us, is “a neologism for the act of taking tasks traditionally performed by an employee or contractor, and outsourcing them to a group (crowd) of people or community in the form of an open call.” Cubicle Sourcing, then, is my neologism for taking a task that ought be done by a community, and assigning it to a team of isolated copywriters and editors.

APA, in other words, did everything backwards; they used Cubicle Sourcing, and then when the text was released, incorporated the errors that were inevitably found in a series of errata and, in the end, another printing. They should have put the 5th edition up on the web and issued a call to their community of users for corrections, updates and clarifications.

In-house editors can watch for inconsistencies, moderate disputes, and so on. All of the major style manuals should be converted to Wikis edited by communities of users. Every two or three years– more often if times warrant– they could produce a by-demand print version. The old, private property/author model– Cubicle Sourcing– is inflexible, too slow to change, and prone to error.

The recent protests over fee increases in California’s higher education system are worth watching and worrying over for a lot of reasons, as a recent post on “Education is a Right” makes clear. “If California has taught us anything,” writers Greogory Candenna, “it is that the amount of fee hikes states and regents will impose on students to mitigate budget shortfalls is limitless.”

He’s not exaggerating. Fee increases have tripled the cost of college in California over the last decade. These are Reagan’s birds come home to roost in every sense. As Governor of California Reagan made his disdain of student protesters all too clear. The anti-war movement convinced Conservatives that too much education– like too much government– is a dangerous.

More important was the Conservative’s so-called New Federalism. which attempted to destroy the New Deal, and hamstring the federal government, by shifting power to the states. This meant, among other things, that there would no longer be a coherent national plan for higher education. Bush’s wildly irresponsible fiscal policies put the icing on the cake. It’ll take years to clean up the mess.