Cost/Benefit for the Better Educated

 

I always have my doubts about hot-news social science research ("Being liberal extends your life!"), but this research below seems solidly based in math (econ) and matches the impression I've had after some 64 years of inhabiting various college and university campuses and hanging at numerous coffee pots to hear the gossip. So for what it's worth: 

The Postsecondary Education & Economics Research Center at American University, using research from the Yale Tobin Center for Economic Policy "found that graduate degrees in medicine, law and pharmacy generally have the highest return on investment. By contrast, degrees in popular fields such as social work, psychology, and curriculum and instruction may actually have a zero to negative return after factoring in the full cost." (WashPost)

Yikes. 

 

Gov. Cooper Trolls Berger/Moore

Cooper with Ross and Spellings.
Yes, that photo is from today.
Photo Jeff Tiberii

This morning Gov. Cooper announced that he is naming a special "Commission on the Future of Public Universities in North Carolina" to take a close look at how the UNC system is operating, presumably and particularly, the highly partisan Republican regime on the UNC Board of Governors (BOG) and on the boards of trustees of the various constituent colleges -- the partisan regime established by Berger/Moore as a further instrument of their authoritarianism.

Cooper's commission will be purely advisory. It will therefore be (1) attacked and then (2) ignored by Berger/Moore, but perhaps it can help focus more of the public on the degrading of higher education in North Carolina.

"We need serious, diverse leadership," the guv's press release said, which we ain't currently got on the UNC BOG. The BOG is 100% appointed by Berger/Moore and is 80% Republican (often from the volcanically partisan branch of the party), with only four unaffiliated voters, and one measly Democrat. As soon as Roy Cooper won the 2016 election, Berger/Moore quickly wrote legislation to extend their rule, assigning the appointment of all constituent university trustees to their own heavily partisan BOG. Currently, the governor can appoint precisely no one to any university governing board.

Diversity? You've got to be kidding!

As close as the guv's press release gets to naming the stunts that have destroyed the BOG's reputation is this paragraph, wherein he alludes to the scandals and collusions that have highlighted the UNC system during the last decade (or since Berger/Moore took over in 2010):

"Unfortunately, a spate of controversies over the last few years has led to concerns that boards plagued by undue political influence and bureaucratic meddling hinder effective university governance. Instability and political interference can have significant impacts on campus leadership, turnover and academic experience for students, and can threaten the university’s reputation and the state’s economy and communities."

Just some highlights of that partisanship which Cooper didn't enumerate: the firing of UNC President and humanist Tom Ross in 2015; the forced resignation of replacement President Margaret Spellings in 2018; the all-too-obvious jockeying of House Speaker Tim Moore for various academic appointments; the 2019 sudden resignation of UNC Chancellor Carol Folt, judged soft on the Confederacy after she supported the removal of Silent Sam from campus; the heavy thumb of an Arkansas donor who seems to have single-handedly nixxed the appointment of Hannah-Jones to the School of Journalism; the refusal to reappoint a widely respected UNC Law professor to the University of North Carolina Press Board of Governors after he questioned the legality of the university's giving a Confederate group a bunch of money to take Silent Sam off the campus; the planned relocation of the UNC System offices from Chapel Hill to Raleigh, presumably so everybody can see the Berger/Moore resting bitch faces more clearly, a proposal that led BOG member Leo Daughtry, a former GOP state lawmaker, to abruptly resign his seat, saying publicly that moving the offices was a further indication of the board’s recent failure to provide "a sufficient buffer" between politics and the university system.

How Do We Know the Guv Just Gave Berger/Moore the Finger?

Who did Cooper appoint to co-chair his commission on higher education? Why, Tom Ross and Margaret Spellings. Isn't that pretty much an eff-you? Also a dare, since Ross and Spellings form an impressive bi-partisanship that ought to be above criticism. (Ha!) Ross was president of the UNC System from 2011 to 2016, a former superior court judge, and president of Davidson College. Spellings was president of the UNC System from 2016 to 2019 and served as the U.S. Secretary of Education under President George W. Bush.

Such distinguished educators might give the GOP some pause in attacking their integrity. Naw. They'll find a way.

The Pirates Take Chapel Hill

 

Hattip to reporter Joe Killian for posting a link to the editorial in Science, "Universities are not political prizes." It opines about the accelerating legislative push in some states to politicize higher education. Cowed administrators quickly learn to comply:

Take the recent incident involving the University of Florida, which blocked liberal professors from testifying as experts in a lawsuit that challenged the state’s voting laws. The university rationalized that as a public institution, it must remain neutral when the real reason was that it didn’t want to anger political overlords.

That article doesn't mention the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, but it could have -- where right now and ongoing there's a bloody pirate-ship boarding by besuited swashbucklers sailing the high seas under the banner of Berger/Moore in the NC General Assembly. 

"Universities are not political prizes"? Yes they are.

Here's what happened at the meeting yesterday of Chapel Hill's Board of Trustees (as reported by Joe Killian), "a special meeting held largely in closed-session":

...the board took the unusual step of not publicly disclosing what they were voting on or using any names or titles. Instead, they voted on three “action items” that were not publicly described and then abruptly adjourned after the vote. [All votes were unanimous with the exception of student representative Lamar Richards, who voted no on one and abstained on two others.]

After fielding questions from reporters throughout the day, UNC-Chapel Hill media relations released a letter from Chancellor Guskiewicz making the announcement shortly after 6 p.m. Thursday. “The UNC-Chapel Hill Board of Trustees approved the Chancellor’s recommendation to appoint Dr. Chris Clemens as executive vice chancellor and provost of the University.” ...

The executive vice chancellor and provost at Chapel Hill serves as chief academic officer (why faculties fear provosts) and CEO, the university Number Two, with immense police powers.

So who is Dr. Chris Clemens and why would the Chapel Hill Board of Trustees keep his name secret during that BOT vote? Hmmm. Are they ashamed?

Chris Clemens, Provost, UNC-Chapel Hill

Joe Killian:

Clemens has been at the center of controversy over the creation of a program at Chapel Hill called the “Program in Civic Virtue and Civil Discourse,” which Clemens and others described as a “conservative center” going back to its inception in 2017. [Donors remain anonymous.] Clemens has since denied the program will be explicitly conservative.

Clemens has described himself as “among the most outspoken conservative members of the Arts & Sciences faculty at UNC for many years, sponsoring the college Republicans, Carolina Review and several other student organizations.

Clemens trained as an astrophysicist but climbed the administrative ladder, currently senior associate dean for research and innovation in the College of Arts & Sciences. "Two UNC Board of Trustees members and one member of the search committee confirmed to Policy Watch that Clemens’s conservative credentials made him an attractive choice for the Board of Trustees and UNC Board of Governors with close ties to the Republican majority in the North Carolina General Assembly."

Mimi Chapman, the chair of the faculty, published an ominous letter to the "University community" in the Daily Tar Heel on the eve of the BOT's secret vote, in which she warned that "the Chancellor is under significant pressure to make a particular choice. Based on the information that is being relayed to me by multiple sources, our trustees and the UNC System are dictating his choices to the point that he really has none to make."

It's not clear that Chapman was referring to Clemens, but it's logical to think so, right?

Corporatism in the University

One of the ironies of the Republican/conservative/free-market ideology as it's taken root in our university system … For all its emphasis on the market as the optimal form of social organization, it ends up producing a whole cadre of bureaucrats and middle-management. Mo titles, mo money.

Specifically, as universities and other public institutions are starved of public funding and are encouraged to be more efficient, the advocates of this model also demand huge amounts of monitoring-- “compliance standards,” “assessment,” and “review.” Chancellors in the UNC System are now more driven than ever before to earn the approval of a hyper-touchy and majorly conservative Board of Governors on criteria that are not necessarily universal nor heaven-sent. 

Under former University President Margaret Spellings’ strategic plan, chancellors had to sign on to several strategic goals. Their pay raises became tied directly to performance reviews of goals-achieved. It takes extra administrative hands to manufacture and handle all that paperwork. University sub-deans and assistant vice chancellors constantly compile long lists of numbers of how their schools are doing on a host of "metrics," such as student retention, five-year graduation rates, rural enrollment, and so on.

Let's call it "corporatism." More managers, more compliance. 

Add the additional squeeze of money. With state funds diminishing as a share of institutional budgets, and with even tuition now capped, campuses have to compete for students, increase their enrollment, which requires all kinds of other managerial resources (“student support”) aimed at attracting those students and keeping track of them, while feeding, housing, and cosseting them.

Plus there’s still a glut of PhDs looking for jobs. Universities just don’t care that much about attracting and retaining the best faculty, because it’s a buyer's market out there. As administrators toy with shifting more and more to online education, even PhDs are becoming unnecessary.

NEW REPORT: New Administrators at AppState Increasing Three Times the Rate of Faculty

“A Review of Faculty Salaries and Budget Priorities at Appalachian" was released October 20 by AppState’s Center for Economic Research and Policy Analysis (CERPA). 

The report reaches the following conclusions: 

- Recent allocations of positions prioritize upper and mid-level administration. Since 2014, the number of full-time upper and mid-level administrative positions increased three times faster than faculty positions. Among the three employment categories -- SHRA employees (Subject to the State Human Resources Act), EHRA Non-Faculty (exempt from the State Human Resources Act), and Faculty -- faculty positions increased at the slowest rate.

- “Trends in allocations reveal recent shifts in budget priorities. In the five-year period between 2008-2013, funding for the academic budget grew faster than funding for each of the three support budgets (institutional, academic, and student). In the most recent five-year period, funding for each of the three support budgets grew considerably faster than funding for the academic budget.”

A Bumpy Ride: The Margaret Spellings History

News leaked yesterday and hit the News and Observer this morning that UNC President Margaret Spellings is out, or about to be out, after less than three years into a five-year contract. She's "quietly negotiated her departure" with the all-Republican Board of Governors, a snake pit where she's repeatedly felt the fangs. BOG member Doyle Parrish, yesterday: "I think it's been a very turbulent experience for her to navigate through the state's political system. Though I think she has done a fabulous job, we have a divisive board and accomplishing her goals and agendas has been difficult for her."

She's been well compensated for the pain. Three-quarters of a million dollars every year, with fat bonuses on top of that.

Her hiring in 2015 (she didn't officially enter the job until March 2016) opened to view the clash over the direction of state-funded higher education between ideological conservatives and the less doctrinaire country-club Republicans.

Here's what happened (at least, in part):

A Margaret Spellings Timeline

New Republican majorities in the NC House and Senate effectuate their takeover of the UNC Board of Governors (BOG), giving the appointment power of new BOG members -- all 32 of them -- to themselves.  Their new board hits the ground running...

January 2015 ... John Fennebresque, the Charlotte attorney and country-clubber who becomes Chair of the BOG, on his own and without consulting his fellow Republicans on the board, fires popular UNC President Tom Ross without cause to begin the Republican takeover. Ross will remain a lame-duck in office until early 2016. The conservatives -- although they applaud getting rid of a liberal like Ross -- are upset at Fennebresque's unilateralism. Said fellow BOG member Marty Kotis, “Most board members did not learn of the [firing of Ross] or the separation agreement until almost a week later ... after the deed had been done.”

February 27, 2015 ... Further flexing their muscle and amid strong student protests, the conservatives on the BOG cynically kill three "progressive" centers of study at three different universities.

2015, spring and summer ... With Tom Ross out of the way, Fennebresque appoints himself to the search committee for Ross's replacement, and with two other close BOG allies, Fennebresque claps down a dome of silence on the process, cutting out the conservatives. 'Pears that Fennebresque had fallen in love with the idea of a high-profile national Republican media figure -- and not an ideological warrior -- becoming the new president, someone with great presence and stature, like, say a former Bush cabinet secretary.

Sept. 2015 ... Countering the high-handedness of Fennebresque, the General Assembly rushes into law Senate Bill 670, which intends to force Fennebresque to present three candidates for UNC president and to do it publicly. Fennebresque ally and fellow country-clubber Pat McCrory, who's announced that he opposes the bill and is clearly teamed with Fennebresque, neither signs it nor vetoes it but sits on it. If he does nothing, the bill becomes law automatically on October 30, giving Fennebresque more than a month to get something done. But if he vetoes it, the General Assembly will quickly override. McCrory buys time for Fennebresque, who leaps into action.

October 15, 2015 ... Fennebresque calls an emergency meeting of the board for October 16, the next day, to "interview" the search committee recommendation. News has leaked that there's only one candidate and it's Margaret Spellings, of the chain of pearls and former Bush administration Secretary of Education. Hardliners are not happy. The team of Berger/Moore in the General Assembly immediately erupt with their own statement: “While the bill has not yet been signed by the Governor, calling an emergency meeting to discuss only one candidate could be viewed as the Board’s [Fennebresque's] attempt to circumvent the overwhelming will of the elected people of the State of North Carolina....” BOG members Thom Goolsby and David Powers write letters to Fennebresque demanding he resign. Goolsby: "Among other things, in your short tenure you have blocked board members from accessing university staff for public information about the system, botched President Ross’ termination, hired an incredibly controversial search consultant and barred two-thirds of the board from participating in the hiring process."

Read more here: https://www.newsobserver.com/news/local/education/article39368007.html#storylink=cpy

October 16, 2015, at the UNC BOG

October 16, 2015 ... Amid chaos -- student and faculty protests and the smoldering glares of BOG conservatives -- Spellings has her coming out at Fennebresque's emergency interview. She speaks. She's good. Fennebresque is ecstatic.

October 23, 2015 ... Fennebresque reaches some accord with the conservatives. At another called meeting today, the full BOG votes unanimously to hire Spellings.

October 26, 2015 ... With the Spellings hire a done deal, John Fennebresque resigns from the BOG. That must have been the "accord": We'll vote for Spellings, but you have to go.

March 2016 ... Spellings takes the office and is faced by strong student and faculty opposition. And she's also constantly stalked by the conservatives and agents of Berger/Moore who want to begin the crack down on the universities. A slim BOG majority begins to infringe on Spellings, and they threaten to move her office completely out of Chapel Hill.

April 2016  ... Under pressure from conservatives who've in the meantime just passed their bathroom law, HB2, and who intend it to be enforced, Spellings sends a memo to all chancellors of the constituent universities, announcing that HB2 is the law and the universities must comply with that law.

May 26, 2016 ... Under new pressure from lawsuits challenging HB2, Spellings makes a stunning about-face: Declares in a court filing that UNC would not be enforcing HB2 after all, in compliance with federal law. Conservatives, not happy.

August 21, 2017 ... Spellings is caught red-handed talking to Governor Roy Cooper about Silent Sam. Protests are beginning to get organized and large. She wants Cooper's help and advice. Republican hardliners go berserk because Cooper wants the statue removed and put into a museum. The conservatives issue a strongly worded letter signed by 15 BOG members demanding that Spellings must never talk to Cooper again without telling them.

July 1, 2018 ... Spellings loses her last strong ally on the BOG -- Chair Lou Bissette (who replaced Fennebresque), who is himself replaced by conservative "hard-liner" Harry Smith. Bissette had been in on the plan to cooperate with Gov. Cooper over the final resting place for Silent Sam, so his days have been numbered for a year.

October 2018 ... Conservatives finally succeed in driving her off.

What Comes Next?
Hardliners are now ascendant on the Board of Governors of the University of North Carolina system. The only thing that can change that is a handover of power to the other party, in one or both of the chambers of the General Assembly. That's the only cure.

What WON'T Become Law in North Carolina This Year

John Wynne, the Civitas conservative who writes occasionally for Thomas Mills' PoliticsNC, was lecturing liberals yesterday morning that we should be thankful for literal small favors: now that "crossover" has been crossed over at the NC General Assembly, that means that several really awful pieces of legislation are now dead for 2015 because they failed to "cross over" -- that is, they weren't passed by at least one of the General Assembly's two celestial bodies.

In other words, we should thank Gawd, because things could be much worse.

Wynne's three examples of Republican political thuggery that won't become law this year:

SB 705: Ensure Fair Sale of Dorothea Dix Property – This bill, if passed, would have revoked the deal made by Governor Pat McCrory and the City of Raleigh for the Dorothea Dix property. Some senators felt Raleigh was getting the land for cheap and wanted to sell it for a higher price. In the end, the bill’s sponsors decided to drop the bill, saying essentially that while they’re not fans of the negotiated sales price, the deal has been done and the state should just live with it.

SB 593: Improve Professor Quality/UNC System – Would have required professors at the UNC system to teach 8 courses a year, focusing more on teaching and less on research. Bill sponsors argued that students deserve the attention of their professors and shouldn’t have graduate student TAs doing all the work. Opponents, including many in higher education, feared that it would wreak havoc at research institutions like UNC-Chapel Hill and NC State. This week, the bill was withdrawn and referred to a legislative study bill. Expect a lot more bills in the future aimed at higher education reform. This one was just a bridge too far, even for most Republican legislators.

HB 348/S550: Religious Freedom Restoration Act Because everyone already knows a little bit about RFRA, there’s no need to go over in detail what it would do. This, and similar legislation in other states, was basically a bone to throw to religious conservatives and was expected to pass easily. That is, until GOP legislators saw what happened in Indiana and got spooked. Social media activists and the high tech industry mobilized against the bill and tainted not only the State of Indiana, but also the words “religious freedom”, delivering another impressive victory for the LGBT movement.

Yes, you godless liberals, you should genuflect toward the Capitol and thank your Republican overlords that the water torture was suspended temporarily for the city of Raleigh, for college professors, and for gays.

We guess that any time the Republican Horde can curb its hatred of our capital city, higher education, and gay people is an almost, nearly good better day. Like ... we didn't get hit by a tornado, an earthquake, or the plague, so why the hell aren't we happily oblivious citizens?

Best Little Whorehouse in North Carolina

The Republicans in the General Assembly are handing out appointments -- or in several cases, reappointments -- to the University of North Carolina Board of Governors (BOG) this week. They have a small variety of human-type persons to choose from: big-dollar donors to political campaigns.

Research by DemocracyNC (published by NC Policy Watch) turned up this: The 30 people "vying for appointment" to the board -- or their family members -- have given more than $1 million to state campaign accounts since 2007. The current chair of the BOG, John Fennebresque, and his wife gave more than $260,000. (He's the guy who gave the disastrous press conference after the BOG fired UNC President Tom Ross for purely political reasons.)

Not for merit, not for an interest in higher education, not for a passion for excellence in learning in North Carolina ... but for filthy lucre these appointments are being made. Pay to play.

You are currently watching the slow-motion destruction of a formerly celebrated university system and economic engine for the entire state.

Not Too Shabby

Boone is ranked 23rd on a list of the 100 smartest cities in the U.S. Burlington, NC, ranked 52nd, but Chapel Hill didn't even make the list!

Pope Center Wants To Sandblast the Color Out of NC Higher Education

A North Carolina right-wing "think tank" (if "thinking" means "maintaining ideological purity"), connected to You Know Who, has issued a report on the University of North Carolina that strongly suggests that a retreat from all this confusing multiculturalism will save the country, or at least save rich white privilege.

Evidently, "western civilization" is the only civilization, and the only literature/history/political thought that should count is Anglo-Saxon in origin.

Just more racial politics. Maybe they should get Don Yelton as Dean of General Education. I hear he might be available.

Doing the Work of Her Donors

Rep. Virginia Foxx, who receives hefty campaign contributions from the for-profit higher education industry, is fighting the Obama administration's plan to put new rules on that industry. So naturally she said this: "It is not the role of the Congress to make college affordable and accessible."

Apparently, it's also not the role of the Congress to make for-profit colleges accountable to the taxpayers. For profit colleges collect $32 billion in subsidies from the federal government. Yes. On average, these institutions derive 70 percent of their profit from the Federal government that Ms. Foxx hates so much. Those big donors to Ms. Foxx's campaign fund also have very spotty records on delivering actual education.

Virginia Foxx ... coddling the rich and making life miserable for everyone else since 1994.

Symm v. U.S.

Good background on the Supreme Court case that led to the ruling that every college student is entitled to vote where he/she goes to college.

Yeah, We're in Good Shape

Hattip: DBS.

Gov. McCrory: Let's Squeeze the University System Until the Thrashing Stops

You'll perhaps recall Gov. Pat McCrory's honest opinion about liberal arts education. He and his budget director, Art Pope, are putting that philosophy into action in their proposed budget for the state of North Carolina.

The Pope Budget, unveiled yesterday morning, proposes to slash the University of North Carolina system budget by $135 million. That's on top of the $400 million cut in the last Republican budget two years ago.

"I am very concerned by the magnitude of the new cuts proposed for our campuses," said UNC President Tom Ross. "I worry about the impact additional reductions will have on our ability to provide high-quality educational opportunities to our residents and to assist in North Carolina’s economic recovery."

Get used to it, educators. The Republican radicals in charge of this state think even less of you than they do of our cities.

ADDENDUM
In a highly charged partisan atmosphere, the Republican bullies in the General Assembly yesterday also tossed out all the Democratic members of the University's Board of Governors, replacing them with Republicans.

Foxx to College Students: "Why Aren't You All Like Me?"

Two Appalachian State University students earned an in-depth profile in the New York Times, interviewed about their struggles to get through college while working part-time jobs. One of the two has had to borrow money.

Also considered in the equation of cost analysis is one Virginia Foxx, congresswoman from the 5th District, who notoriously bragged last year, “I spent seven years getting my undergraduate degree and didn’t borrow a dime of money.” She turned her acid tongue on college students for going into debt to get an education (when she wasn't cussing interns in her role as the Elevator Monitor Lady in the Capitol).

Also interviewed in the Times article was the director of student financial aid at ASU who "declined to comment on Representative Foxx’s nose-to-the-grindstone, debt-free exhortation. 'Probably anything I say about Virginia Foxx will get me fired,' she says." She didn’t hesitate to note "the long odds of earning enough while enrolled in college full-time to avoid student loans. 'If I could make that kind of money, believe me, I’d do it.' A spokeswoman for Representative Foxx declined an interview request."

Madam Foxx does not take questions from reporters, nor from constituents who might challenge her ungenerous view of the world.

Gov. McCrory Attacks Liberal Arts Education

Gov. McCrory

We're only weeks into the McCrory administration and already we have one of those quotes that's going to haunt him until Judgment Day. On Bill Bennett's radio show, McCrory attacked liberal arts courses, particularly at UNC-Chapel Hill and especially "gender studies."

"If you want to take gender studies that's fine. Go to a private school and take it. But I don't want to subsidize that if that's not going to get someone a job," McCrory said. He said that he had instructed his staff on Monday to draft legislation that would change how much state money universities and community colleges receive -- "not based on how many butts in seats but how many of those butts can get jobs."

Almost immediately -- well, in fact, immediately -- #buttsinseats began trending on Twitter. Don't know how many of the butts in gender studies can get jobs, but we know one huge butt that became governor of North Carolina.

Attacking college professors is one of the easiest jobs a bully can pick for himself. A college professor is like a 19th-century "tenderfoot" blundering into a Wild West saloon for people like McCrory. "Let's make 'im dance a little," says old Pat McCrory, drawing his six-shooter.

Don't know what Pat McCrory majored in, and don't really care. But he appears to have kept the blinders on: "If it don't get me a job, it ain't worth my time." That's the McCrory doctrine. Which is a serious misunderstanding of what higher education can achieve, as well as a butt-headed "huh huh huh" about anyone not similarly short-sighted. It was also a declaration of war on UNC-Chapel Hill, which is certainly what we're looking for in a thoroughly modern governor of North Carolina.

Don't know what Pat McCrory's college major was in, but we know Bill Bennett's ... political philosophy.

Great is the God Irony!

FOOTNOTE
Hattip: LO.

Jason deBruyn, writing in the Triangle Business Journal this morning, demolishes The Guv's argument with simple statistics:

In North Carolina, the overall unemployment rate still hovers above 9 percent, but according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, those with a bachelor’s degree or higher have an unemployment rate below 4 percent. 

Conversely, for those with less than a high school diploma, the unemployment rate is 11.7 percent, three times higher than the rate with a bachelor’s degree.

ADDENDUM
McCrory was a political science and education major.

Almost immediately after McCrory finished his interview with Bennett, his flacks were trying to mend the damage: "This was not meant to be a personal attack on UNC,” spokeswoman Crystal Feldman said. “Gov. McCrory did not mean to tarnish UNC’s reputation.”

Yeah, right.

Read more here: http://www.charlotteobserver.com/2013/01/29/3820186/mccrory-wants-to-revamp-higher.html#storylink=cpy#storylink=cpy

Read more here: http://www.charlotteobserver.com/2013/01/29/3820186/mccrory-wants-to-revamp-higher.html#storylink=cpy#storylink=cpy

NC Universities, Better Buckle Your Seat Belts!

The signs are multiplying and they are explicit.

The Boss of the North Carolina Republican Party sees our state's universities as Public Enemy No. 1. A fundraising letter just went out from one of Art Pope's many political tentacles, the John William Pope Center for Higher Education Policy, that said in part (and we're not making this up):

The people have spoken. President Obama will be our president for the next four years. 

While we congratulate the president on his victory, conservatives are asking themselves why he won. One reason is our universities.

For years they have failed to give undergraduates an understanding of markets, the role of free enterprise, and the problems of a highly redistributive state. Obama himself lacks that appreciation, which is part of why our economic slump continues.

The Pope Center is dedicated to restoring balance to our colleges and universities. We expose misguided, one-sided courses that attack capitalism and we help students on campus see other aspects of important issues in U.S. history. We encourage universities to teach analytical skills that citizens need. Step by step, we are showing how to bring change to our universities....

Ah, "an understanding of markets." From people who know the cost of everything and the value of nothing.

The Boss Man, Art Pope, who principally funded the Clown College take-over of the NC General Assembly, has also gotten himself appointed to an important University of North Carolina advisory committee, along with his fellow conservative millionaire Fred Eshelman. Pause for a musical cue:

Dum-dum-DUMB!

The outcry against Appalachian State University students getting some kind of mythical special coddling, because they're allowed to vote at all in Watauga County let alone have their very own polling place on campus, has become boilerplate conservative dogma over at The Watauga Conservative. Damn students mess everything up!

More recently, one of the leaders of the Watauga Tea Party Conservatives, Nate DiCola, has written one of the more hilarious public fantasies about the baleful influence on local elections of Appalachian State University students. They are a force to be "overcome." A bit more analysis of 2012 Watauga election stats might have revealed to Mr. DiCola that it wasn't ASU students who defeated Adams, Gable, Oliver, Jordan, and Foxx. It was fellow Republicans, for widely different reasons. Take a look at straight-party voting stats. It was Republicans who did not vote straight party, and it was because of one or more of the above candidates. They split their tickets.

Nevertheless, ASU students are getting blamed for ending civilization, and they are consequently in for some heavy weather with this new Republican governor and his Tea Party troops in the General Assembly. The first thing they'll do is move Early Voting off campus. Count on it.

Then they'll continue to cut budgets. And from the tenor of the Art Pope fundraising letter above, I would expect to see some public demonization of individual professors, or of whole programs of study.

Virginia Foxx Holds a Hearing

Congresswoman Virginia Foxx is more important than you can imagine, waaay too important for your peasant and peanut-sized brain to even begin to appreciate. She chairs an actual subcommittee of an actual committee of the actual Congress of the United States. She held a hearing and issued a press release about it:

WHAT SHE SAID
"In recent months, the issue of rising college costs has shifted to the forefront of our national discourse – and rightly so, as millions of young people struggle to manage school debt and find job opportunities in the lagging economy."

WHAT SHE MEANT
Please address me as “Doctor Foxx,” as I have a doctorate. It’s an Ed.D. -- granted -- not a Ph.D., but it’s framed and on the wall, right over there. I got it without taking out any student loans, bitches!

................

WHAT SHE SAID
“All of us have the best of intentions when it comes to helping students afford a college education. And we all agree debt should not be a foregone conclusion in higher education.”

WHAT SHE MEANT
Commie, pinko, left-wing, radical professors are indoctrinating students every minute, and I’ll grow a tail and hooves before I’ll vote to help one mush-brained American teenager attend any university in this or in any other universe.

Virginia Foxx: Belittling People for Over Four Decades

Ken Ilgunas, in today's Winston-Salem Journal:

...[Virginia] Foxx has plenty of tolerance for today's broken system of higher education and its ever-rising costs, but little tolerance, she says, for the students who are struggling with the system that she herself helped create. 

Today's college students don't need belittling words from someone of Foxx's generation, for whom college was affordable. They need the sort of assistance that Foxx profited from when she was young.

What Kind of Teacher Is She?

Foxx made a bizarre remark last week about American students, saying she has “very little tolerance” for young people saddled with student debt, which now tops $1 trillion in America. 

The Center for Responsive Politics discovered why Foxx doesn’t care about student loan debt. Duh.

It’s because she’s making big bucks from for-profit college corporations. The organization found that in just the last year, Foxx has raked in nearly $50,000 dollars from the for-profit college industry, which encourages students to take out larger loans to meet higher tuition costs.

The Department of Education found that one out of every six students at for-profit schools eventually is forced to default on his or her student loans. And while President Obama is urging Congress today to not let interest rates on federal students go up, he’s facing a headwind from Republicans like Virginia Foxx who are bought off by profiteers running for-profit schools.

Hattip: truth-out.org.

Flakking for the Pay-to-Play Educational System

Credit: AP/Jose Luis Magana

At the same time that Foxx has been bragging that she has no tolerance for students who rack up debt to get a college education, it comes out just how bought off, hypocritical, and downright evil she is. Her bill to exempt for-profit colleges from accountability (which Andrew Leonard says should have been titled “The Protecting the Freedom of For-Profit Schools to Suck off the Government Teat Without Any Accountability Whatsoever Act”) passed the Republican-dominated House recently but is stuck (forever, one would hope) in the Senate.

The full measure of The Madam's astounding hypocrisy? Here 'tis:

"...Foxx herself is benefiting from the waste and abuse of federal tax dollars. Among the top 20 financial contributors to Foxx in the 2011-2012 cycle are the Association of Private Sector Colleges/Universities, the Apollo Group (owner of the University of Phoenix), and Corinthian Colleges. Since federal student loans comprise the vast majority of the revenues of those for-profit schools, it follows that their campaign contributions to Foxx are also made possible by U.S. taxpayers."