Month: February 2014

After using fabricated evidence and even outright lies to justify invading Iraq, the United States has since pulled out.  And the violence continues.  Nearly 8,000 civilians were killed last year in bloody sectarian/revolutionary violence. Now the United States is preparing to pull out of Afghanistan.  Indeed, President Barack Obama is talking about moving up the time table and even threatening to remove all U.S. troops by year’s end, in part because of his endless frustrations with Afghan President Muhammad Karzai.  Obama’s advisers reportedly want him to leave about 10,000 troops behind to help battle Al Qaueda and Taliban insurgents. Whether this is a real threat by Obama or just diplomatic brinksmanship is almost irrelevant to some degree; this year or next, the United States will pull out all or nearly all of its troops from Afghanistan, more than a decade after invading it. Whether one originally supported or opposed the invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan (I vehemently opposed the former and had mixed feelings about the latter), the current issue confronting the United States has to do with the aftermath of invasion, not its impetus: To what degree does the United States have a moral obligation to help nations it has invaded?  And how much of that obligation is tied to the endemic violence that U.S. invasions helped unleash?

A look at the numbers explaining why American college tuition is skyrocketing while also developing an exploitative two tier labor system.

My essay on the problems in American higher education first appeared at 3 Quarks Daily as a single article.  I am re-printing it here in two parts. Part I: Identifying the Problems American colleges have undergone substantial changes during the last three decades. Rising tuition costs, which have far outpaced the rate of inflation, are nearly universal. Most growth has come in non-instructional areas. Many schools have added layers of administration, seen their rosters of administrators substantially enlarged, and spent millions of dollars on non-instructional construction such as recreation centers, student unions, and administrative buildings. A serious re-shuffling of labor has degraded the ranks of teachers Tenured and tenure track (TTT) positions have been replaced by contingent faculty (ie.  non-tenure track) who now make up the majority of teachers Contingent faculty fall into two broad groups: part-time labor (adjuncts and graduate students) and full time labor (mostly lecturers and visiting faculty). There are many explanations for these wide ranging changes, as well as varying degrees of change among America’s hundreds of colleges.  For example, private colleges are generally less dependent on public largess, though many of them do in fact receive public subsidies from federal, state, and even local governments.  Meanwhile, the public colleges that rely more heavily on public spending face different circumstances depending on which states they’re in; each has different budgets and policies for supporting higher education.  In some states there has been extreme volatility in funding while some have been more stable, though in almost all states, public funding as a share of public college budgets has declined. This has led schools not only to raise tuition rates, but to also seek substantial revenue from fund raising, which runs the gamut from alumni contributions, to naming rights to campus buildings, to exclusive contracts with junk food venders.  For example, many schools have cut deals with either Pepsi Co.  or Coca Cola, Inc.  granting one or the other exclusive rights to sell beverages on their campus. Good luck finding something healthy to drink.