I usually love the work of Thomas Frank, but I am unsure what to make of this.
Towards the end we see this paragraph that no progressive could disagree with: > What ought to happen is that everything I’ve described so far should be > put in reverse. College should become free or very cheap. It should be > heavily subsidized by the states, and robust competition from excellent > state U’s should in turn bring down the price of college across the board. > Pointless money-drains like a vast administration, a preening president, > and a quasi-professional football team should all be plugged up. > Accrediting agencies should come down like a hammer on universities that > use too many adjuncts and part-time teachers. Student loan debt should be > universally refinanced to carry little or no interest and should be > dischargeable in bankruptcy, like any other form of debt. But try to reconcile that with this piece of vitriol that comes earlier on: > Colleges and universities clamor greedily these days for pharmaceutical > patents and ownership chunks of high-tech startups; they boast of being > “entrepreneurial”; they have rationalized and outsourced countless aspects > of their operations in the search for cash; they fight their workers nearly > as ferociously as a nineteenth-century railroad baron; and the richest > among them have turned their endowments into in-house hedge funds. Now, consider the seventeen-year-old customer against whom this predatory > institution squares off. > He seems to hate college as an institutions with the passion of a jilted lover that we sometimes hear from certain PEN-Lers. http://thebaffler.com/past/academy_fight_song -raghu.
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