Eating Our Educational Seed Corn
Sometime before Derby, Kentucky Governor Steve Beshear is going to have to call the General Assembly back into session to deal with a budget deficit that is getting bigger by the day.
This time, they probably won't be able to avoid massive cuts in higher education. They won't even try, because no Kentucky politician ever lost re-election for cutting funding to elitist, ivory-tower eggheads.
PZ Myers brilliantly decries the attitude pervasive in every state that cutting educational budgets is like eliminating dessert, when it's really a starvation diet.
One of the challenges facing the country right now in this time of economic crisis is that we're also about to be confronted by the result of a decade of neglect of the nation's infrastructure, in particular, the chronic starvation of our universities. It's an insidious problem, because as administrations have discovered time and again, you can cut an education budget and nothing bad happens, from their perspective. The faculty get a pay freeze; we tighten our belts. The universities lose public funds; we raise tuition a little bit. A few faculty are lost to attrition, and the state decides to defer their replacement for a year or two or indefinitely; the remaining faculty scramble to cover the manpower loss. We can continue to do our jobs, but behind the scenes, the stresses simply grow and worsen.
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Since the state is contributing less and less every year, we will soon reach a point where we simply won't be allowed to replace essential personnel, and then the whole system is going to break down.
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The United States is supposed to take some pride in its educational system — at least, we're accustomed to hearing politicians stand up and brag about how our universities are the envy of the world. It's a lie. We're being steadily eroded away, and all that's holding it up right now is the desperate struggles of the faculty within it. We're at the breaking point, though, where the losses can't be supported much more, and the whole edifice is going to fall apart.
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The next layer of the problem is the state government. They keep seeing the educational system as a great target for saving money with budget cuts, because the effects will not be manifest for several years — and so they steadily hack and slash and chop, and the universities suffer…and now they're at the point where they begin to break, and they keep cutting. Write to the Florida legislature! Tell them that we need to support higher education, that as a scientific and technological nation, we are dependent on a well-educated citizenry!
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Another part of the problem is…you. Why do you keep electing cretins to your legislatures who despise the "intellectual elite", who think being smart is a sin, who are so short-sighted that they care nothing for investing in strengthening the country in ways that take ten or more years to pay off? Stop it! Your representatives should be people who value education enough to commit to at least maintaining the current meager level of funding, but instead we get chains of ignoramuses who want to demolish the universities…and simultaneously want to control them to support their favorite ideological nonsense, via "academic freedom" bills. This is also a long-term goal: we have to work to restore our government to some level of sanity. It's been the domain of fools and thieves for far too long.
Read the whole thing.
Cross-posted at They Gave Us A Republic ....
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4 comments:
Cutting education is what fundamentalism is all about. Also plays into the hands of the actual elitists that can afford education at any price and have no conscience about how it's used.
The great misdirection is the endorsement of education by the fundies --- as long as vouchers & subsidies apply to parochial centers as well.
If we had a real progressive taxation schedule and a real fiduciary requirement to balance the buget over realistic cycles and a prohibition on borrowing except with a declaration of war --- a formal declaration of war, we would put these Republican generated recessions and depressions behind us. We would have some hic-ups & hic-downs in our financial cycles, but they would graph-out as mild waves instead of these wild gyrations we see now.
Education of the 60-somethings of the VietNam era is what brought us the technocratic revolution. Old Scout tells me he will have a piece up with names & dates on technocracy on Thursday - check his weblog.
When I was in college, in 1971 or 72, in the course of researching a paper for history class, I ran across a Time magazine article in which Henry Kissinger was referred to as (if memory serves) "an intellectual in an era not known for its love for such people."
So this is not a new phenomenon.
Yes, anti-intellectualism is in fact one of the most insidious forces at work in America, keeping people dumb or encouraging them to stay dumb, so the elites who, as BimBeau says, can afford education at any price, can keep the rest of us as far down as possible.
I'm not sure when anti-intellectualism started to be current in this country. I know it's been rampant my entire life. But as long as we let the elites do this to us, we will get what we deserve at their hands.
Let me recommend to you an article I wrote that was somewhat on this topic. The relevant portion is somewhat down the page, and starts, "So obviously, as usual I'm missing something here."
http://logicalnegativism.blogspot.com/2009/03/idle-threats.html
They're protecting themselves and their elitist pals. It's been going on for centuries.
Believe it. It's not better brains we're up against - it's merely more money, in the hands of blithering idiots. I refer you to Monty Python's depiction of upper class twits. We have the same here.
Rich makes a gooood point. When we watch John Cleese as the Minister of Silly Walks, we are watching the progress of technology and education in the control of Republicans.
Lots of action and no progress.
Take a look at the makeup of the State Senate.
We are screwed!
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