Published on Alternet (http://www.alternet.org)
Home > The Right's War on College: "Starving the Beast" Exposes the Fight to
Destroy America's Great Public Universities
________________________________________
The Right's War on College: "Starving the Beast" Exposes the Fight to
Destroy America's Great Public Universities
By Andrew O'Hehir [1] / Salon [2]
September 9, 2016
Anyone who attended one of Bernie Sanders' rallies during the Democratic
primary campaign knows what the central issue was behind his call for
"political revolution." There was one unifying factor that drove Sanders'
unexpected groundswell of support, and that crystallized all the themes of
economic inequality and social injustice he repeated in stump speech after
stump speech. Not by coincidence, it was also the most prominent issue on
which Hillary Clinton ultimately felt compelled to move almost all the way
to Sanders' position, after repeatedly insisting that she disagreed with
him. That issue was the cost of a college degree, perhaps the most visible
symptom of a far-reaching attempt by the super-rich and their ideological
allies to reshape public education to serve their interests.
At a certain point in every rally, the Vermont senator would ask young
people in the crowd to call out how much they owed in student debt. I'm
twice the age of many Sanders voters, and I heard numbers that dwarfed any
amount of debt I have ever amassed in a lifetime of irresponsible
credit-card spending. Generally, the winner in a Bernie call-and-response
session owed somewhere between $90,000 and $120,000 in higher-education
debt, but sums in excess of $150,000 were not unknown. Maybe that level of
debt seems almost comprehensible for someone who went to Harvard or Stanford
and then straight into law school or medical school, although I still
suspect it's likely to have a baleful effect on those individuals and the
whole society. But Bernie's core audience went well beyond the Georgetown
Law demographic - they were likelier to be graduates of Penn State or
Arizona State, UMass or UConn or UCLA. When kids from those schools enter
adult life owing that kind of money, something has gone badly wrong.
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 [3]" (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?
We're better off answering that question directly: We don't know why. One
aspect of the social contract, which many right-wingers and libertarians
hope to shred, is that we fund certain things with our tax dollars without
looking at them as business transactions. It's entirely possible that young
woman's research project on the "Chanson de Roland" will be filed away in
the university library, never to be read by human eyes again. But plenty of
projects in engineering and the sciences go nowhere too, and we simply don't
know what great books or great ideas or revolutionary insights might flow
from that scholar (or her future students) somewhere down the line. The
entire point of higher education - or, let's say, one of its most important
points - is that it creates an environment of intellectual ferment that is
likely to produce unforeseen and unimagined discoveries.
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.
Some of these crusaders, like Harvard Business School disruption-guru
Clayton Christensen, may be true believers who think that American higher
education will be better and more affordable if it is effectively
privatized. Old-fashioned concepts like academic tenure and accreditation
standards and federal student loans and wide-ranging research into abstruse
topics stand in the way (such people would argue) of an efficient and
economical delivery system for education that will maximize its social
benefits. But honestly, beneath all the jargon the political motivations are
glaringly obvious.
As LSU grad James Carville says in the film, the state-by-state attack on
public higher education is closely aligned with many other right-wing
causes. It dovetails perfectly with anti-tax czar Grover Norquist's long
campaign to starve many aspects of the public sphere into the private
sector, and to shrink the federal government so small that it can be drowned
in the bathtub, in his famous phrase. It also fits with the stealth
culture-war being waged by Charles and David Koch, who have used endowed
chairs and other strings-attached donations as a means of reorienting the
ideological map at numerous colleges and universities. The fight to save
America's state universities - which are literally the legacy of Thomas
Jefferson and Abraham Lincoln - from the tycoons and technocrats is the
fight for the future. We've been losing that fight, but thanks to Bernie
Sanders we are finally paying attention.
"Starving the Beast" is now playing in New York and Los Angeles, with wider
national release and home video to follow.
Andrew O'Hehir is a senior writer for Salon.
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Source URL:
http://www.alternet.org/education/rights-war-college-starving-beast-exposes-
fight-destroy-americas-great-public-universities
Links:
[1] http://www.alternet.org/authors/andrew-ohehir
[2] http://www.salon.com
[3] http://www.starvingthebeast.net/
[4] mailto:corrections@xxxxxxxxxxxx?Subject=Typo on The Right's War on
College: "Starving the Beast" Exposes the Fight to Destroy
America's Great Public Universities
[5] http://www.alternet.org/
[6] http://www.alternet.org/%2Bnew_src%2B
Published on Alternet (http://www.alternet.org)
Home > The Right's War on College: "Starving the Beast" Exposes the Fight to
Destroy America's Great Public Universities
The Right's War on College: "Starving the Beast" Exposes the Fight to
Destroy America's Great Public Universities
By Andrew O'Hehir [1] / Salon [2]
September 9, 2016
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Anyone who attended one of Bernie Sanders' rallies during the Democratic
primary campaign knows what the central issue was behind his call for
"political revolution." There was one unifying factor that drove Sanders'
unexpected groundswell of support, and that crystallized all the themes of
economic inequality and social injustice he repeated in stump speech after
stump speech. Not by coincidence, it was also the most prominent issue on
which Hillary Clinton ultimately felt compelled to move almost all the way
to Sanders' position, after repeatedly insisting that she disagreed with
him. That issue was the cost of a college degree, perhaps the most visible
symptom of a far-reaching attempt by the super-rich and their ideological
allies to reshape public education to serve their interests.
At a certain point in every rally, the Vermont senator would ask young
people in the crowd to call out how much they owed in student debt. I'm
twice the age of many Sanders voters, and I heard numbers that dwarfed any
amount of debt I have ever amassed in a lifetime of irresponsible
credit-card spending. Generally, the winner in a Bernie call-and-response
session owed somewhere between $90,000 and $120,000 in higher-education
debt, but sums in excess of $150,000 were not unknown. Maybe that level of
debt seems almost comprehensible for someone who went to Harvard or Stanford
and then straight into law school or medical school, although I still
suspect it's likely to have a baleful effect on those individuals and the
whole society. But Bernie's core audience went well beyond the Georgetown
Law demographic - they were likelier to be graduates of Penn State or
Arizona State, UMass or UConn or UCLA. When kids from those schools enter
adult life owing that kind of money, something has gone badly wrong.
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 [3]" (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?
We're better off answering that question directly: We don't know why. One
aspect of the social contract, which many right-wingers and libertarians
hope to shred, is that we fund certain things with our tax dollars without
looking at them as business transactions. It's entirely possible that young
woman's research project on the "Chanson de Roland" will be filed away in
the university library, never to be read by human eyes again. But plenty of
projects in engineering and the sciences go nowhere too, and we simply don't
know what great books or great ideas or revolutionary insights might flow
from that scholar (or her future students) somewhere down the line. The
entire point of higher education - or, let's say, one of its most important
points - is that it creates an environment of intellectual ferment that is
likely to produce unforeseen and unimagined discoveries.
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.
Some of these crusaders, like Harvard Business School disruption-guru
Clayton Christensen, may be true believers who think that American higher
education will be better and more affordable if it is effectively
privatized. Old-fashioned concepts like academic tenure and accreditation
standards and federal student loans and wide-ranging research into abstruse
topics stand in the way (such people would argue) of an efficient and
economical delivery system for education that will maximize its social
benefits. But honestly, beneath all the jargon the political motivations are
glaringly obvious.
As LSU grad James Carville says in the film, the state-by-state attack on
public higher education is closely aligned with many other right-wing
causes. It dovetails perfectly with anti-tax czar Grover Norquist's long
campaign to starve many aspects of the public sphere into the private
sector, and to shrink the federal government so small that it can be drowned
in the bathtub, in his famous phrase. It also fits with the stealth
culture-war being waged by Charles and David Koch, who have used endowed
chairs and other strings-attached donations as a means of reorienting the
ideological map at numerous colleges and universities. The fight to save
America's state universities - which are literally the legacy of Thomas
Jefferson and Abraham Lincoln - from the tycoons and technocrats is the
fight for the future. We've been losing that fight, but thanks to Bernie
Sanders we are finally paying attention.
"Starving the Beast" is now playing in New York and Los Angeles, with wider
national release and home video to follow.
Andrew O'Hehir is a senior writer for Salon.
Error! Hyperlink reference not valid.
Error! Hyperlink reference not valid.
Report typos and corrections to 'corrections@xxxxxxxxxxxx'. [4]
Error! Hyperlink reference not valid.[5]
Source URL:
http://www.alternet.org/education/rights-war-college-starving-beast-exposes-
fight-destroy-americas-great-public-universities
Links:
[1] http://www.alternet.org/authors/andrew-ohehir
[2] http://www.salon.com
[3] http://www.starvingthebeast.net/
[4] mailto:corrections@xxxxxxxxxxxx?Subject=Typo on The Right's War on
College: "Starving the Beast" Exposes the Fight to Destroy
America's Great Public Universities
[5] http://www.alternet.org/
[6] http://www.alternet.org/%2Bnew_src%2B
