The Koch Brothers and the End of State Universities

[Donnachaidh]

http://www.juancole.com/2011/05/the-koch-brothers-and-the-end-of-state-universities.html

The real scandal around the endowment by the Koch brothers of two chairs at Florida State University is that state universities now have to seek such outside money and accept strings. The reason they have to do so is that many state legislatures have chosen not to have state universities any more. At many ‘state universities’ the state contribution to the general operating fund is less than 20 percent, falling toward 10 percent.

This abandonment of their responsibilities to higher education on the part of the states hurts students in the first instance. Institutions that used to be affordable to students from working and lower middle class backgrounds are now increasingly out of reach for them. State universities are becoming the new Ivies, a good bargain still for the upper middle class and the wealthy, but a distant dream for the daughter or son of a worker in a fast food restaurant.

This development is also scary because it promotes the corruption of academia. In fact, as Charles Ferguson showed in his film, “Inside Job,” some academic economists are already hopelessly corrupt. The barracuda capitalist system in contemporary America provides many incentives for economists to promote laissez-faire, anti-regulatory ideas of the sort that led to the 2008 collapse of our economy. Endowments with strings attached are just one more.

Starting in the 1980s, state legislatures began putting their money into other things. Some cut taxes for the rich. Some engaged in a vast expansion of the prison system impelled by the phony ‘war on drugs’ that led to a vast increase of inmates guilty of nothing more than toking a little weed. (Getting high off alcohol or prescription drugs is not punished by American society or we’d have tens of millions incarcerated instead of only 2.3 million– though even the two million make the US very peculiar in world terms. Some forty percent of these inmates are incarcerated on non-violent, drug-related offenses. Few other countries are so fixated on maintaining such an archipelago of Gulags. Portugal has decriminalized most drugs, and nothing bad happened as a result).

More at the link --

[cyberswede]

1. K&R

Thanks for posting.

Our state legislature (under Republican leadership) cuts funding to the state universities, then complains when the universities need to raise tuition. I don't know how high tuition will be by the time my 10- and 8-year old kids are college-age. :(

[BadgerKid]

2. Not surprising that when there's a funding vacuum forming,

private entities will come in (or otherwise be solicited) to support the university.

How many universities and colleges would the financial elite be able to buy?