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What Charles Ferguson did for (or to, more exactly) Wall Street in his Academy Award winning 2010 documentary “Inside Job”, Steve Mims has now done with “Starving the Beast”, a shocking film about the “starving” of state universities by rightwing politicians opening tomorrow at the IFC Center in NY. Essentially the same neoliberal con artists that concocted the mortgage-based securities bubble that brought down the banking system in 2008 are now busily at work hollowing out flagship universities like the University of Wisconsin in the name of “reform”. Does it matter to those who idolize Ayn Rand that their policies are undermining the future viability of capitalism itself? Apparently not.
As someone who worked at Columbia University for 21 years, I began reading the Chronicle of Higher Education on a daily basis mostly as a way of keeping on top of IT developments at American universities. Since I was also a long-time socialist, I could not help but notice one article after another reporting on the corporatization of the university. Billionaires were gaining control over places like the U. of Wisconsin through the leverage they enjoyed through Republican Party governors that saw most professors as the enemy of the free enterprise system. Mims, who is as skilled as Ferguson at getting rightwing creeps to hoist themselves on their own petard, allows someone like Jay Schalin of the Pope Center for Higher Education Policy to openly question the need for studying history, literature, art or anything that is not directly related to the goal of churning out graduates destined for the corporate world.
full: https://louisproyect.org/2016/09/08/three-documentaries-5/ _________________________________________________________ Full posting guidelines at: http://www.marxmail.org/sub.htm Set your options at: http://lists.csbs.utah.edu/options/marxism/archive%40mail-archive.com
