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(Tenured Radical)

Sunday, April 10, 2005

Gawd, another grotesque headline,
this one in today’s Washington Post:




HEY, PROFS, COME BACK TO EARTH



Clunky in its own terms, this header is also at odds with the subsequent opinion piece’s argument, which is that American professors are all too earthbound, having abandoned the life of the mind for noisy political grandstanding.

The “new reality about college in America,” writes the author, is one of frustrated “middle-class parents, who are growing increasingly resentful of paying sky-high tuition for colleges they see offering their kids a menu of questionable courses and politically absurd campus climates that detract from the quality of a university education…In 18 years of in-the-trenches experience counseling kids on their college choices, I've never seen the unhappiness as widespread as it is today. If colleges don't tone down the politics, and figure out how to control ballooning costs, they run the risk of turning off enough American consumers that many campuses could marginalize themselves right out of existence… [The] sheer number of outlandish political controversies at universities across the country, coupled with escalating fees, is alienating parents from the very institutions they have been supporting through tax and tuition dollars.”

It’s not the professors, then, but the cost of college that’s stratospheric. The professors, or so the argument here goes, are mucking about in the political dirt of the moment. “Colleges are having an ever-harder time making what they do comprehensible to the families footing the bills. I counsel families of all political stripes -- liberal, conservative and in-between -- and varied income levels, but they all agree on one thing: the overly politicized atmosphere on campuses is distracting colleges from providing a solid education to our young people.” What families do understand is that “Loans are now 70 percent of financial aid packages, making college an increasingly sour deal for students, who are saddled with debt once they graduate. Meanwhile, 321 colleges and universities are sitting on endowments of $100 million or more, and scores of university presidents earn in excess of $400,000 a year.”




“The national percentage of alumni donating to their alma maters,” the Post author also notes, “has declined for three years in a row and is now below 13 percent.” He means this to strengthen his point that people are turned off, for ideological and financial reasons, from college altogether. And I think he’s right.

But consider also the strange situation of a school like Harvard, with an endowment of 22.6 billion dollars. Why, if you were an alumnus, would you give Harvard any money? Even if you continued to adore the place, what would be the point of adding your sniveling one thousand bucks to that?

The most wealthy and prestigious of universities in our country, I mean to say, aren’t part of the crisis this writer evokes. They subsist in a stratosphere of their own, revolving perpetually without need of students or alumni or anything. They are self-sustaining planets in the firmament of the American university, and they do not need to worry about the dark scenario of alienation that the Post writer sketches.

To be sure, such schools are evolving into rich people’s playhouses, theatrical settings for the cognitively dissonant dramas of liberal guilt and reactionary self-indulgence, apparent rigor and actual grade inflation… But their growing triviality makes them no less sought-after. For while it’s true that, as the Post writer notes, many parents “aren't sure that the Ivies -- where the political battles on campus are fiercest -- are worth the money,” it’s also true that the United States contains tons of parents for whom Harvard’s tuition is affordable.