The right’s war on college: “Starving the Beast” exposes the fight to destroy America’s great public

[applegrove]

The right’s war on college: “Starving the Beast” exposes the fight to destroy America’s great public universities

by Andrew OHehir at Salon

http://www.salon.com/2016/09/09/the-rights-war-on-college-starving-the-beast-exposes-the-fight-to-destroy-americas-great-public-universities/

SNIP.............

But what was it that went wrong, exactly? To those of us who graduated from college before the extraordinary explosion of tuition rates over the last 20 years or so, it looked like some sort of dreadful accident: the unfortunate collision of fiscal crisis, political conflict and ballooning costs, or something. Universities were operating at enormous deficits, or so we were told, for reasons that were not entirely clear. State legislators apparently lacked the funds to make up the difference, and definitely lacked the political will to raise taxes. What was to be done? In one egregious example cited in the new documentary “Starving the Beast” (not an untypical example, sadly), public funding for Louisiana State University went from 75 percent of the school’s operating budget to about 13.5 percent — in nine years. It took LSU’s president threatening to furlough the university’s entire staff for a year before the state legislature decided not to make further cuts.

Even if you weren’t directly impacted by this issue, or believed you weren’t, the disparity was shocking: At the lowest of those sums mentioned above, $90,000, my dad could have paid for my 1980s education at an elite private university — for roughly 21 years. Surely this was all a big mistake, right? No one intended to defund public colleges and universities, and shift the cost of education so dramatically onto the shoulders of students and their families, did they? Needless to say, that’s a leading question. As “Starving the Beast” makes all too clear, what happened to public higher education in America was no accident. Instead, it was one of the most ingenious and nefarious elements of a long-term right-wing assault on the public sphere. That assault has taken many forms in many places, but it represents the pursuit of a grand political and ideological goal under the cloak of “innovation” and “reform” and “disruption,” and its effects have been disastrous.

Director Steve Mims and his sources explore a series of battles over higher education at some of America’s most prestigious state universities — in Texas, Virginia, North Carolina and Wisconsin, for starters — that presented on the surface as being non-ideological or at least nonpartisan. Although the outcomes of these conflicts varied, the content of the struggle was strikingly similar: Outside forces, presenting themselves as reformers seeking to make public education relevant to the 21st-century economy, tried to undermine or rewrite the basic mission of a major university. Tenure and academic freedom came under attack, as did disciplines in the liberal arts or humanities whose economic value was not immediately apparent. As Frederick Hess of the American Enterprise Institute, a conservative think tank, puts it in the film, why should the taxpayers subsidize your daughter’s thesis about gender roles in medieval poetry?

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As University of Virginia historian Siva Vaidhyanathan says in “Starving the Beast,” the right-wing attack on public education rejects that model entirely. In state after state, supposed reformers like former business-school entrepreneur Jeff Sandefer, or Tea Party-infused Republicans like Gov. Scott Walker of Wisconsin or former Gov. Rick Perry of Texas, have sought to replace it with a nightmarish combination of a consumer-oriented business (where students are consumers, and education is a commodity sold at its presumed market value) and a “techno-fundamentalist” Silicon Valley worldview where disruptive or revolutionary change is valued for its own sake.




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[benld74]

1. Enlightening

[LongTomH]

2. K&R for Truth!!!!

[RadiationTherapy]

3. I am a 15 year university employee who watched this happen from the inside.

To add to all of this, salaries for staff - plenty has been said about faculty and adjuncts - are at/near poverty levels while enrollment and tuition have skyrocketed. More students, more money, more hours, and more work per hour every year, but the pay stays nearly the same. University staff - much more so than faculty - are suffering greatly as a result.

[Auggie]

4. This is along the likes of a disaster capitalism scenario ...

as outlined by Naomi Klein in her book, The Shock Doctrine.

Purposely destroy the public university model and replace it with something private and costlier.

[applegrove]

5. And one where you are not taught to think freely.

[Auggie]

6. Or even taught at all if the price of tuition keeps one away.

[applegrove]

7. To destroy both the teaching class and the middle class. So all the power is with big business.

[Auggie]

9. +1

[hunter]

8. Medicine has been looted in a similar fashion.

Costs have soared, yet medical providers are now expected to be "one-size-fits-all" assembly line workers, passively accepting insurance company management.

Can't wait until I get all my medical care at the Wal-Mart clinic from a teenage kid called "doctor," the same kid called "professor" when he's retraining us old farts at the "university" next door.

And the sad thing is that inferior medical care will cost more, just as an inferior education does.

[mike_c]

10. this is the story of my career....

I've spent the last 25 years watching this happen from inside academia.

[suffragette]

11. Strong K&R