http://theragblog.blogspot.com/2010/03/tom-hayden-rising-cost-of-college.html
30 March 2010
Tom Hayden
We can't afford to be quiet about the rising cost of college
--
"There are some things we feel, feelings that our prevailing,
acquisitive, and competitive corporate life, including tragically the
universities, is not the way of life for us..."
That heartfelt plea for university reform, issued in 1969, is
striking because it was voiced by Hillary Rodham, a student at
Wellesley College. Are there any lessons or comparisons to be drawn
from those turbulent times for the students and faculty members who
are today demonstrating against the rising cost of higher education?
As a student at the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor in those days
and an itinerant sociologist at Scripps College now, I believe we can
look to the past as legacy but not as blueprint.
The current generation of young people deserves admiration for the
contributions they already have made: creating hip-hop culture,
winning sweatshop-free purchasing agreements, leading online advocacy
groups like MoveOn.org, and for being the backbone of Barack Obama's
unprecedented volunteer campaign. They will be the cradle of social
activism for the next 20 years.
But the challenges they face on their campuses are far different from
those of my generation, and perhaps more profound. Tuition at
Michigan in 1960 cost less than $150 per semester. So I could obtain
my degree, edit the student newspaper, go south to work in the
civil-rights movement for two years, return and enter graduate
school, and never feel that I was falling behind in the competitive
economic rat race that young Hillary spoke out against.
Students today, however -- even those who hold two part-time jobs --
fall tens of thousands of dollars into debt, a burden that limits
their career choices. Dropping out for social activism brings
competitive disadvantage. The speedup of academic pressures dries up
discretionary time that used to go to dreaming and exploring.
Campuses are crowded with scrambling multitaskers for the most part
too busy to protest the pace. Meanwhile, increases in the cost of
college exceed inflation every year, intensifying the squeeze.
We had different grievances. The curriculum was often irrelevant to
the social crisis we perceived ourselves inheriting; it needed
reform. Students were powerless under the paternal doctrine of in
loco parentis; we wanted rights. Students were disenfranchised, even
though men could be drafted; we needed the vote and alternatives to the draft.
Structurally excluded, we went to the streets, to the outside,
demanding change on the inside. It's an exaggeration, but only after
strikes, rioting, and taking over buildings did colleges offer the
mainstream menu of women's studies; black, Latino and Asian studies;
queer studies; and environmental programs that they do today.
Now most students read Howard Zinn in history classes; back then Zinn
was fired from Spelman College for marching with the Student
Nonviolent Coordinating Committee.
In those days, university administrators were personified by the
impersonal managerial elites depicted by C. Wright Mills, our
sociologist hero. In recent decades, the multiversity has been
succeeded by a privatized hybrid institution enmeshed in Wall Street
machinations, a development epitomized by the former Harvard
University president Lawrence H. Summers. Excessive financial
risk-taking has resulted in depleted portfolios everywhere.
No longer independent, higher education has succumbed to the
political pressures of regents and trustees who all too often are
tied to banks and corporations. For an example of this inbred
conservatism, consider a recent survey that showed the public
favoring the use of federal stimulus money to keep tuition down, even
if that meant leaving less money for operations. In response, a
spokesman for the American Council on Education said, "The public is
not always right."
The question for today's students is not whether they can read Noam
Chomsky, Anaïs Nin, or Zinn, but whether they can afford to.
The recent outbreak of protests on hundreds of campuses is a
promising sign that economic populism will be a central dynamic in
any student movement of the future. Since many of the most active
protesters today are students of color, there is greater potential
for a coalition that includes inner-city taxpaying communities than
there was when so many of the militants were from affluent suburbs.
Making college less affordable just as a large number of qualified
aspirants are emerging from disadvantaged minority communities is an
explosive issue. The numbers of women in college are larger than in
the past, which might also widen the coalition.
The value of the past lies in remembering how recently higher
education was affordable, even cheap. It's not inevitable that a
college education today costs so much. Undergraduate education is
virtually free at the Sorbonne or the National Autonomous University
of Mexico, and a year at Oxford costs no more than community colleges
charge here.
The choices we have made as a country -- to relentlessly privatize
our public institutions; to eventually spend three trillion dollars,
by some estimates, on the war in Iraq instead of on our public
universities; to bail out billionaires on Wall Street while hitting
students and their families with repeated tuition increases -- are
choices with consequences that we have to rethink or accept.
As recently as 1982, when I entered the California State Assembly, my
first battle as a naïve new legislator was against fee increases at
community colleges, which then were proudly free and accessible.
Under President Ronald Reagan and Gov. George Deukmejian, the
(Republican) lobbyists for the colleges supported first-time fee
increases to avoid budget cuts. Their motivation was not merely
budgetary but also a matter of ideological principle. Nothing, they
said, should be free in life, which meant that investment in public
colleges and universities should be replaced by a
consumer-marketplace approach.
Most of the Democrats went along when they were promised that the
fees would be temporary. When the recession of that period ended,
those fees became permanent, and they have escalated ever since. A
similar pattern has been true of tuition increases at California
State University and the University of California.
Were I still in politics, I would run for office on a promise to keep
the magical possibilities of higher education affordable for today's
American families, and for the next generation seeking new
opportunities for their children.
I wonder why the silence from politicians is so deafening. Is it that
colleges and universities are easier targets at budget time than
corporate-tax loopholes are? Is it that students and faculty members
are marginal players in the great game of campaign contributions? Or
that college constituencies are too fragmented, divided, and
transitory to unify as an effective force for change?
The recent discontent on campuses is a healthy challenge to America's
priorities. I hope that Hillary Clinton hears an echo of herself
before she and her colleagues become the politicians she warned us against.
--
[Tom Hayden is a visiting professor of sociology at Scripps College,
in Claremont, Calif. His most recent book is The Long Sixties: From
1960 to Barack Obama (Paradigm, 2009).]
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