The Koch Brothers and the End of State Universities
Posted: 13 May 2011 12:29 AM PDT
The real scandal around the endowment by the Koch brothers of two
chairs at Florida State University is that state universities now have
to seek such outside money and accept strings. The reason they have to
do so is that many state legislatures have chosen not to have state
universities any more. At many ‘state universities’ the state
contribution to the general operating fund is less than 20 percent,
falling toward 10 percent.
This abandonment of their responsibilities to higher education on the
part of the states hurts students in the first instance. Institutions
that used to be affordable to students from working and lower middle
class backgrounds are now increasingly out of reach for them. State
universities are becoming the new Ivies, a good bargain still for the
upper middle class and the wealthy, but a distant dream for the
daughter or son of a worker in a fast food restaurant.
This development is also scary because it promotes the corruption of
academia. In fact, as Charles Ferguson showed in his film, “Inside
Job,” some academic economists are already hopelessly corrupt. The
barracuda capitalist system in contemporary America provides many
incentives for economists to promote laissez-faire, anti-regulatory
ideas of the sort that led to the 2008 collapse of our economy.
Endowments with strings attached are just one more.
Starting in the 1980s, state legislatures began putting their money
into other things. Some cut taxes for the rich. Some engaged in a vast
expansion of the prison system impelled by the phony ‘war on drugs’
that led to a vast increase of inmates guilty of nothing more than
toking a little weed. (Getting high off alcohol or prescription drugs
is not punished by American society or we’d have tens of millions
incarcerated instead of only 2.3 million– though even the two million
make the US very peculiar in world terms. Some forty percent of these
inmates are incarcerated on non-violent, drug-related offenses. Few
other countries are so fixated on maintaining such an archipelago of
Gulags. Portugal has decriminalized most drugs, and nothing bad
happened as a result).
State universities were designed by far-sighted legislators who
believed that it is the duty of a state to provide high-quality,
low-cost education to children of working and middle class families.
Thomas Jefferson thought that you cannot have a democracy if the
“common man” is not educated, and though he is associated with ‘small
government’ ideas in some spheres, he thought states should be funding
universities.
But the Neoliberal and Neoconservative philosophies that have
dominated both parties in the US in recent decades view such a
commitment as undesirable. The United States is being refashioned as a
plutocracy in which the wealthiest 1 million persons are a new
aristocracy and governmental programs that inconvenience them by
making them pay their taxes are dismantled.
Positions at state universities ought to be decided upon by the
students, faculty, and deans in consultation. They shouldn’t be
decided just because a wealthy crank wants us to study X. Along with
Koch-funded positions in ‘unregulated capitalism’ of the sort that
brought us the 2008 meltdown, we no doubt could have a raft of
positions in Atlantis Studies and Post-War Ufology. Rich people are
good at making money. They aren’t necessarily good at academic skills.
In fact, many are downright hostile to academic knowledge that brings
into question their shibboleths. The tenure system was created for
academics precisely because one got fired, at the University of
Pennsylvania, in the early 20th century, for objecting to child labor.
Some of the regents made their money that way and took offense.
We don’t need more positions in economics departments in state
universities for ‘free market economics’ of the sort the Koch brothers
funded at FSU. Is that what the students there want and need? Is that
what the faculty senate would have voted for? Maybe we need some
positions in how bad it is for a society to have all its unions gutted
or to have its gini coefficient (which measures economic inequality)
skyrocket.
The president of FSU, who defended the Koch deal, did not mention that
such outside endowments are skewing the curriculum at state
universities in unfortunate ways.
But here is the objectionable thing, which he admits, about the way
the search for the positions was conducted:
‘ These 50 applications were sent for input to an advisory board
approved by the Koch Foundation. The advisory board, formed in 2008,
consisted of two FSU faculty members, both Eminent Scholars in
Economics, and a Ph.D. economist appointed by the Koch Foundation. (It
is not unusual for a donor to have representation in an advisory
capacity.) ‘
This allegation is simply untrue. It is not the case that academic
institutions routinely insert an outside advisory board into the
middle of the search process. In fact, this way of proceeding is
absolutely outrageous, more particularly because one of the members of
the advisory board was not even on the faculty! Moreover, it is
invidious for the Kochs to give some FSU faculty more of a voice in
hiring than others.
The only legitimate academic endowment is one with no strings
attached. The money should go into the endowment up front. And then
the university procedures should be followed in making hires. The
endower is owed profuse and frequent thanks and can come hear the
public lectures given by those hired with their money, but they
absolutely should not have their thumbs on the till in the hiring.
But ideally state universities should be funded by state legislatures,
and should have charters of academic and curricular independence from
those legislatures. State universities should be for the people. We
already have elite universities for the elite.
Our Congress has already largely been bought by the corporations it is
supposed to be regulating and by a raft of special interests, from the
National Rifle Association to the Israel lobbies. Now if our state
universities are to be bought, even our academic knowledge will be
corrupt.
And, it won’t be long before the BP Chair in How there is No Climate
Change, and the Saudi Arabian Chair in the Necessity of Beheading
Adulterers, and the Avigdor Lieberman Chair in Ethnic Cleansing
Solutions, and the Communist Party of China Chair in Google Censorship
crowd onto our campuses along with a host of other junky positions.
Are Americans doomed to have both their minds and their bodies
enslaved by cranky rich people, and how can we hope to remain globally
competitive if so?
--
Jim Devine / "Segui il tuo corso, e lascia dir le genti." (Go your own
way and let people talk.) -- Karl, paraphrasing Dante.
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