In my mostly half serious quest to found a new academic discipline called ‘corruption studies’ I’d like to draw on the study of racial intolerance and white supremacy, which distinguishes between run of the mill individual racism and institutionalize racism. A similar distinction can be made between corrupt people in academia– administrative supremacists, as it were– and institutionalized corruption. Each is in the news in Illinois this week.

The institutionalized corruption in question starts with the ongoing rise in salaries of administrators despite the ongoing funding crisis of higher education and the economic slow-down. While Rome burns, it seems, administrators are only willing to slow down their greed to a few points below inflation (“Salaries Rise for Senior Administrators but Lag Behind Inflation“).  It’s a “my wife drives two Cadillacs” sort of  class callousness.

Also corrupt is the “clout” system at the University of Illinois, now nominally ended, that facilitated the admissions of well placed students (“Relatives of lobbyists, campaign donors got lawmakers’ help to enter U. of I.“). Interestingly, the man hired to run the system in the wake of that scandal, President Hogan, has been asked to resign after his right-hand woman was caught trying to manipulate faculty opinion via faked email.

Faculty are calling for Hogan’s resignation, citing a “lack of confidence” (“UI Faculty Urge President Hogan to Resign“).  Hogan belongs in the “my wife drives two Cadillacs” file not only because he shows no sign of stepping down but also because he arranged to have the author of the email, Lisa Troyer, given a tenured faculty position (“Lisa Troyer Accepts Faculty Job with U of I“). That’s individual corruption raised to an art form.

It seems to be a week for market worshipers in academia. In “To Fix Student Lending, Rethink the Concept,” it’s two very conservative economists telling us, once again, that the market  has failed and so the solution is, well, the market. Or maybe the implicit argument is that the market only failed because of government interference and if you got rid of that interference then the market will work.  Or maybe it failed due to a lack of information or….

Authors  Gillen and Vedder begin by setting aside the most basic argument in any discussion of debt, forgiveness, (not a very sexy economic word) as if it had no real place in student debt discussions.  That’s how we know that we are going to hear an argument designed to help banks and not people.  It’s not as if we don’t have the money; by some estimates, nearly 13 trillion was spent bailing out the economy, and then there’s that war…

We could forgive student debt– or some large part of it– and free up billions of economy-stimulating dollars while undoing a profound injustice in which the collective benefits of education were paid for by shifting the costs to individuals. We could also use forgiveness to reward students who have gone into poorly paying professions, like teaching. No, we have to set aside that argument in favor of reforms of the current system, rooted in private profits.

If your loans are too large, for example, Gillen and Vedder say, then you should be able to file for bankruptcy. Never mind that the Bush era (2005) bankruptcy laws are already written to benefit banks. These are just solutions at the margins, though. To really fix things, we need some “measure of quality in higher education,” so that the market can work to keep down the cost of education and, by extension, the amount of student loans.

Gillen and Vedder don’t want to talk about changing the current system, they want to rationalize (to use a favored economic term) a system of indenture. Students will be forced to pick education and learning based on– surprise!– the employment market because as human capital they would be expected to pay a portion of their income to private banks for, presumably, for all of their working lives. Isn’t that what’s already happening?