Public Higher Education Is 'Eroding From All Sides,' Warn Political Scientists - Facult... - 2 views
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The ideal of American public higher education may have entered a death spiral, several scholars said here Thursday during a panel discussion at the annual meeting of the American Political Science Association. That crisis might ultimately harm not only universities, but also democracy itself, they warned.
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And families who are frozen out of the system see public universities as something for the affluent. They'd rather see the state spend money on health care."
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Cultural values don't support the liberal arts. Debt-burdened families aren't demanding it. The capitalist state isn't interested in it. Universities aren't funding it."
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Instead, all of public higher education will be essentially vocational in nature, oriented entirely around the market logic of job preparation. Instead of educating whole persons, Ms. Brown warned, universities will be expected to "build human capital," a narrower and more hollow mission.
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His own campus, Mr. Nelson said, has recently seen several multimillion-dollar projects that were favorites of administrators but were not endorsed by the faculty.
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Instead, he said that faculty activists should open up a more basic debate about the purposes of education. They should fight, he said, for a tuition-free public higher-education system wholly subsidized by the federal government.