This has been diaried before, but I am particularly disgusted this morning after reading this rehash of the proposal on Alternet:
Crazy White House Proposal: Rank Colleges Based On How Much Graduates Earn
> by Les Leopold.
Honestly, crap like this really makes me want to throw in the towel after a lifetime of trying to make colleges focus on what we all really need to know.
below the orange fleur de lump for more of my outrage.
It is really true that our esteemable leader proposes we throw out all pretense and turn a college education into a financial instrument as Leopold points out?
This making-money metric illustrates how far we've drifted into a new era of financial hegemony, which I'm calling the billionaire bailout society. A generation or two ago, Obama's proposal would have met with derision, and not just from obstructionist Republicans. For the WWII and baby boomer generations it was honorable to serve—to help make your community and your country a better place. After so much war and destruction, and after so much poverty and discrimination, it was a badge of honor to join the Peace Corps or help build a cooperative or community organization to serve the disadvantaged. Even wealthy political elites like the Kennedys made it clear that they considered public service a much higher calling than just making money. You didn't have to be a radical or even a liberal to believe that public service was a good in itself. Going to college gave you special access to develop a deeper humanistic view of the word, to find your calling, and to sharpen the skills needed to help make the world a better place instead of making seven figures. How quaint!
My heart left Obama a few years ago during the health care debate which I worked so hard to move in the single payer direction, but that doesn't mean he can't break my heart over and over with still another right wing idea coming out of our socialist White House.
Is no idiotic proposal a bridge too far?
It hardly makes sense for me to continue to try to teach my students something valuable and fight with my university about our standards and direction if my party leader will undermine my efforts at every turn.
The corporatization of the university is a fully accomplished fact.
Anyone out there have some proposals for providing the education our people need in order to understand how they have been turned into solent green for Wall Street?
Eat your children would at least be an honest slogan for these policies.
Yet we still have to read the eleventeeth dimension chess argument on these pages.
Isn't anyone who has a strong voice around here on my side, the side of some compassion for the vast underclass that the American masses have become?