Higher Education

Doing some email housekeeping I came across an old email sent to a good friend following a discussion about higher education. Kathleen is a very well educated (several post-grad degrees including a PhD in Bio-ethics which could not land her a job) and very nice Canadian socialist who has lived in Arizona for the past 25 years or so. She is married to a successful physician, also Canadian, who claims, unpersuasively, in my opinion, not to be a socialist.

I thought the email worthy of wider dissemination. As is almost always the case with leftists, in my experience, they never bother to really engage. There was no response to my email nor was its subject ever brought up again the dozen or so times we have had dinner together since I wrote it.

The facts described in the final paragraph are astonishing, in my opinion.

"Dear Kathleen,

Add my thanks to Susan's. We appreciate your hospitality and always enjoy the company.

I came across this  http://www.the-american-interest.com/blog/2014/02/15/university-administrative-glut-worse-than-we-thought/  article this morning and thought I would share it with you in the context of our conversation last evening.

I have never met Crowe (President of Arizona State University) and assume he is a nice guy never having read or heard anything to the contrary.

Nice as he may be, he and his like minded colleagues have pushed a very cynical model for increasing the size and budgets of their organizations at the expense of 10's of thousands of students whose ever increasing tuition expense lead to ever increasing borrowing, ending, for many, in financial servitude. All facilitated by the never ending increase in funding of federal student loan programs promoted by their like-minded colleagues running the federal bureaucracies. It is the national socialist version of command and control economy. Never works but, for some reason, remains very compelling to those who think that their lever-pulling will produce a better outcome than their predecessors. 

I prefer to believe that all these people believe they are promoting the best policies for all involved. The fact that  they think that does not make them correct. They are obviously, demonstrably and tragically wrong. Unfortunately the consequences of the tragedy are not visited on them (elites never suffer) but on the naive young people persuaded that it is worth borrowing large sums of money to finance a degree that might once have been valuable but has been devalued by the PC university environment and huge proliferation. Things for which there is a huge oversupply generally fall in value.

Did I understand you to say that ASU has a program that requires chairpersons to deliver 1 1 hour lecture per year  and tenured professors 2 1 hour lectures per year in order that they not fall out of touch with the students? I know I asked you to clarify at the time but am still hoping I misunderstood you."