to bail or not to bail out higher education?
From the right, Eric Gibson attacks higher education (“Pleading Poverty: Colleges Want Parents to Foot the Bill for Their Largess”). From the left, Chris Hedges does the same (“The Best and the Brightest Led America Off a Cliff”).
Gibson wants colleges and universities to tighten their belts and get within the limits imposed by the “free market” without ever asking whether this neo-liberal model is still credible in the current era of financial crisis. Hello? Bank bailouts? Why no higher ed. bailout? Gibson refuses to entertain this proposition. He seems to think universities have turned students into lazy, big-government loving welfare princes and princesses but that schools will no longer be able to sustain the tuitions necessary to luxuriate our youth.
Hedges, meanwhile, mounts an anti-elitist critique of those mealy-mouthed, wimpy college students, who kow-tow to authority and are meek, mild robots in the armies of the rich and powerful. Universities, he believes, have turned students into frightened sheep who fear to dream of a life of critical thinking and rebellious intellectual exploration.
Like Gibson, Hedges also does not turn to the idea of increasing governmental investment in higher education. Instead, he is content to throw out the bathwater of more engaged, critical institutions of higher learning with the babies he so despises for their passivity and elitist yearnings.
The most telling quotation from these two essays comes from Robert J. Massa, vice president for enrollment and student life at Dickinson College in Pennsylvania. According to Gibson, Massa told the New York Time, “What we’ve done in higher education is let our dreams and aspirations dictate our cost structure.” To which I thought to myself: “so, what’s wrong with that?”
Shouldn’t we let our dreams and aspirations lead us, especially when it comes to educating our youth to become smart, productive, capable, and critical citizens of the nation and the world? Would not this be a smart use of our governmental resources and tax dollars?
Sure, both Gibson and Hedges are correct: universities and colleges do not need to coddle students. But they do need to create robust campuses and cultures for the study of knowledge and the skills of critical thinking. They need to give a greater number of young people (and middle-aged and older people as well) access to this world.
Aren’t universities and colleges too big to fail?
Addendum: Jesse Hagopian, “I’m Changing the School’s Name to Chrysler”