If people spend other people’s money on other people, they are not careful about the amount of money they spend, nor are they careful about what they spend it on. That is government.

“Evidence of Absence,” Donald Rumsfeld, Harpers, May 2011

I am always behind on my reading– unemployment, if nothing else, may fix that– and this morning I found this example of one of what Rumsfeld calls his  intellectual “snowflakes.” As Rumsfeld writes elsewhere in the same piece, “Before the thugs, go the liars.” Even if we disagree about how the money is spent, an ethical democratic government spends, by definition, our money on ourselves. The thuggery that follows this Rumsfeldian lie continues.

It always begins with de-funding: the more you cut back financial support for government services, the worst things work, and the worst things work the more you can claim that government doesn’t work well. The logical end of this process is dismantling, which is what is apparently being attempted at the University of Northern Iowa (“Cuts Ahead“).  This would represent a new, more profound stage in the class war facilitated by our ongoing economic problems.

It’s one thing to wonder how far the cuts will go, or to see how financial shortfalls are used to line the pockets of administrators and to undermine faculty and staff salaries.  That seems to be standard operating procedure. It’s another thing altogether to think that the ongoing fight against university labor and labor rights might go so far as to begin shutting down whole chunks of public universities.  Yet that is exactly what seems to be on the horizon.

I am always fascinated by the way the ruling class of academia, or its professional mouthpiece, the ACTA, manages to both invert common sense and to slyly inject a “market solution” into almost any debate without actually calling it a market solution. Orwell couldn’t have described it better. This week, in “Message to Senator Durbin: Level the Playing Field”  the ACTA asks the public universities to model themselves after Phoenix.

This isn’t a call for “fairness” in any sense, and it’s a proposal that would un-level the playing field in the same fashion that the public schools have been made profoundly inequitable through standardized testing, on the one hand, and by undermining the creative role of teachers, on the other. It also ignores the real inefficiencies, which lie in administrative costs. Why? Democracy is like learning itself: unruly and messy and difficult to control.

They’d rather have more control over how we’re educated and they’d rather weaken the public system– which by definition values people over profits–whenever possible. That’s why there’s so much interest in standardized forms of educational and institutional measurement and in the for-profit universities, which are allowed to experiment in reductive methodologies that are unacceptable– so far, anyway– in the public university.