These foundations are great. They find $300,000 that somehow couldn’t be found for scholarships and give it to politicians who visit campus for a few hours to hawk a ghosted book and give a speech. Their 30,343-capacity football stadium can’t attract half that, so money that could go to scholarships or something vaguely academic instead goes to buy seats – empty seats, but they’re paid for – in a football stadium.
This – as this post’s category puts it – is where the simulacrum ends. It’s the way simulacral culture eventually ends up infecting even our universities.
June 29th, 2014 at 10:07AM
Some years back an Ohio educators’ union encouraged its negotiators to regard university-affiliated foundations as the equivalent, I guess, of a second, and only nominally independent, university cashbox. I guess the idea was to counter administrators’ pleas of poverty in collective bargaining. Not sure how that idea worked out.