Professors as Welfare Queens?

[Donnachaidh]

http://www.truth-out.org/professors-welfare-queens61981

Long-time Liberals join neocons in attack on professors and colleges: Hacker and Dreifus' "Higher Education?".

Fish Stink From the Head

From Obama on down, the political atmosphere is deeply polluted by the use of "centrism" as a self-description of what are essentially retrograde right-wing views. Under Obama, the US wars in Afghanistan, Pakistan and Iraq continue, as do the lies put out about them. Guantanamo goes on. Obama's "Deficit Commission" warms us up for cuts in Medicare and Social Security. "The perfect is the enemy of the good," and, thus, we have health care "reform" by and for the insurers, with higher premiums and profits, and more evasions of coverage by merchants of death like UnitedHealthCare. Evictions continue and are genteelly hidden from view. A heroic life-long struggler for racial equality is fired by Obama on the say so of a reactionary fool. Government reads our emails. Your credit card company finds new ways to fuck you, big time.

From Reagan's nonexistent "welfare queens" to today's "unnecessary medical tests" and old people viewed as burdens to be put out on the ice, atypical large expenditures - or rumors of them - are used as justification for enormous cutbacks. We associate these arguments with the right, but more and more they come, as well, from the "liberal" center. Consider Andrew Hacker and Claudia Dreifus' hot new "Higher Education? How Colleges are Wasting Our Money and Failing our Kids - and What We Can Do About It," (Times Books/Henry Holt, published August 3). Hacker is professor emeritus of political science,at Queens College, City University of New York, and earlier taught at Cornell (a character in Alison Lurie's "The War Between the Tates" is based on him). He has written about race, class and gender and appears frequently in the pages of The New York Review of Books. He is second-generation in higher education: his father was a dean at Columbia. Dreifus has a long and honorable history in feminism and the left (going back to Students for a Democratic Society). Readers may share my admiration for her interviews with scientists in The New York Times' Tuesday science section, and, particularly, her attention to women in science. A collection of her "Scientific Conversations" was published in 2001. (In admiration, I befriended her on Facebook, from which some of the following information comes, as well as from the book itself and from the official site.)

More at the link ---

[LWolf]

1. Interesting read.

Thanks. :hi:

[damntexdem]

2. Oh, yeah, that's us! Just librul welfare queens.

Thinking we should get our wonderful pay for mere 60-hour weeks. And we should obviously be blamed for state defunding of higher education, growing corporatization of academic MANAGEMENT, and for wanting academic freedom to seek truth rather than parrot the latest rightwing blather.

[Sanity Claws]

3. Universities are part of the problem today

I have a gripe with universities but not the college professors.
I am astounded at how much universities charge in tuition. They have turned themselves into a feeder system for large multinational corporations and have largely ignored their mission to educate and serve a public good. (They are tax-exempt organizations and thus have an obligation to serve the public good)

For example, Columbia Law charges approximately $60K in tuition per annum. Put living expenses on top of that, and you can be sure that its graduates are carrying over $150k in debt by the time they graduate. Nobody with that debtload is going to do community work. They will have to sell themselves to the highest bidder, namely a law firm that represents megacorporations, because that's where the money is.

[bbgrunt]

4. Either many academics are some of the most

politically naive souls out there or they are really bucking to be promoted to administration. I weep every time I hear someone from academe pushing the idea that tenure is outdated, that professors shouldn't do research, or that universities should be run like businesses and that student evaluations should be the sole measure of a professor's teaching effectiveness.

I call people like that weasels.

[mike_c]

5. tripe like this should be balanced with AAUP policy statements....

Here is the AAUP position on academic freedom and tenure: http://www.aaup.org/AAUP/pubsres/policydocs/contents/1940statement.htm