The logic of American capitalism is always at bottom profoundly a-moral if not immoral and it’s never more obvious than in a recession. You’d think that with so many people out of work we’d be all the more likely to embrace national health care. Why kick people when they are already down, right? But it seems to have the opposite effect, creating a kind of moral circling of the wagons.

I have mine, and I’m willing to protect it, but I won’t share a thing. That’s the message of our current down-turn. Education is no different. In tough times, you’d think the impulse would be to protect the programs that help the folks that need the most help. After all, in hard economic times the poor and the illiterate and the old need education more than ever.

But as this story (“Sophie’s Choice for Two Year Colleges” ) in Inside Higher Ed suggests, exactly the opposite is happening; schools are cutting programs that serve immigrants, the old, and those who need the most help in reading and writing. “What will go?” Scott Jaschik, writers, “A lot of remedial education.” Economics is brutal.

If this recession is doing nothing else it is is consolidating the power of those already in power, shifting resources away from those most in need, reinforcing privilege of all sorts. Meanwhile, of course, on the other end of the spectrum, executives get multi-million dollar bonuses. That makes sense, but a reading class for someone old and perhaps miles from any family is too much to ask.

Addendum: I just saw this interview with the economist James Galbraith, (Rein in entitlements? No. Increase them, says James Galbraith) who holds a contrary view of how we should respond to the recession:

As Galbraith elaborated in an article in a recent issue of the Washington Monthly, “The entitlement reformers have it backward; instead of cutting Social Security benefits, we should increase them, especially for those at the bottom of the benefit scale. Indeed, in this crisis, precisely because it is universal and efficient, Social Security is an economic recovery ace in the hole. Increasing benefits is a simple, direct, progressive, and highly efficient way to prevent poverty and sustain purchasing power for this vulnerable population.”

There’s a nice, if (as it says) rambling post over at the Progressive Historian that mentions a myth connected to college sports. I followed that link over the a piece about the so-called “Flute Factor.” Doug Flutie was a football player at Boston College in the 1980s. I don’t know Flutie from fruit but his spectacular work on the filed supposedly led to jumps in admissions at the school.

Administrators have since used this idea of the “Flutie” effect to justify the often enormous expenditure on athletics, particularly football. The piece explains that while a small percentage of admissions’ growth might be attributed to football, the surge in student enrollment was the result of several years of concerted effort on the part of the college. I’ve long been fascinated by the almost obsessive attachment many academics and administrators seem to have to the games played by their students.

I was on a university governing body once and in the middle of yet another budget crunch we had appointed a special committee to investigate why the athletic program was using almost a million dollars of academic money to keep itself afloat. After several weeks the committee returned, not with an explanation of how they might return the money to its proper use, but with a request for a budget increase! They didn’t have enough money for the long bus trips they had to take to compete.

A handful of us were more than a little shocked, but the majority (mostly administration types) were not. (It was mostly administration types because the administration had long ago tweaked the rules to ensure that professors could not actually govern the university, but that’s another story.) It’s a not so subtle reflection of anti-intellectualism, I think, in several senses. Administrators simply cannot image marketing their school without athletics, for one thing.

It goes beyond that, too, and includes a kind of sentimentalizing of student life. No one looks back on those long nights of trying to pass organic chemistry, or the first desperate attempt at an English paper. Supposedly, what we remember are things like football games. Parents and alumni, then, aren’t impressed by, say, academic publications or research. They want a winning team. It’s a viscous circle. College promote the idea of athletics, then they say they need athletics to promote the college.