NYT: At Public Universities, Warnings of Privatization

[DeepModem Mom]

At Public Universities, Warnings of Privatization
By SAM DILLON
Published: October 16, 2005


Taxpayer support for public universities, measured per student, has plunged more precipitously since 2001 than at any time in two decades, and several university presidents are calling the decline a de facto privatization of the institutions that played a crucial role in the creation of the American middle class.

Graham Spanier, president of Pennsylvania State University, said this year that skyrocketing tuition was a result of what he called "public higher education's slow slide toward privatization."

Other educators have made similar assertions, some avoiding the term "privatization" but nonetheless describing a crisis that they say is transforming public universities. At an academic forum last month, John D. Wiley, chancellor of the University of Wisconsin-Madison, said that during the years after World War II, America built the world's greatest system of public higher education.

"We're now in the process of dismantling all that," Dr. Wiley said.

The share of all public universities' revenues deriving from state and local taxes declined to 64 percent in 2004 from 74 percent in 1991. At many flagship universities, the percentages are far smaller...."At those levels, we have to ask what it means to be a public institution," said Katharine C. Lyall, an economist and president emeritus of the University of Wisconsin. "America is rapidly privatizing its public colleges and universities, whose mission used to be to serve the public good. But if private donors and corporations are providing much of a university's budget, then they will set the agenda, perhaps in ways the public likes and perhaps not. Public control is slipping away."...


http://www.nytimes.com/2005/10/16/education/16college.html

[IndianaGreen]

1. Republicans want to do away with anything named "public"

They have been working hard at making public schools fail, and they have been reducing support for higher education. Only the children of the elites will be able to afford college.

[kenny blankenship]

3. Public education is socialism

Everything must be owned in the coming ownership society, and no one has a Constitutional right to education--and in pretending that they do by subsidizing education (which used to be a wholly private affair), the government has violated the Constitution and greased the slippery slope to other Red ideas like public healthcare and (shudder) universal health insurance.

The Constitutionally proper role of government is to defend PRIVATE PROPERTY, and make war--not to erode the very idea of property with community funded this, and state-guaranteed that! With the individual bracketted by government supplied services--education, healthcare, disaster relief,etc.--he loses his autonomy as a free agent and even begins to doubt his responsibility before God for every little act and thought, while at the same time becoming soft and incapable of making independent decisions as a citizen. He moves with the crowd and waits for a sign from his rulers about how to vote and what to think. His freedom becomes a useless vestigial appendage to him and consequently soon disappears altogether, as tyrants have no difficulty stripping people of things that have no practical worth to them, but encounter resistance mainly when they take away what is valued as a good or benefit.

Why I tell you if you allow public funding of education the next thing you know there'll be masses of people running around with the idea that it's the government's job to protect their jobs and to promote a standard of living for the common run of humanity that they think is worth living, not simply what employer's decide to provide and what the market will bear!

[Botany]

2. First the public schools and now the universities .....

..... what made America great is being shut down along w/
our jobs, our downtowns, our parks, our environment, and
our free media.

Welcome to the world of the mega corporations; and I not "loving in it."

We will have the super rich, a struggling middle class, and a ever
growing poverty level.

Hurting your educational system is like eating your seed corn.

[Coastie for Truth]

4. Earlier thread - same NY Times Article