Disir
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- Sep 30, 2011
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There seems to be intentional confusion as to why tuition is so high. California is a prime example. It is showcased in this article. Furthermore, it also highlights what Republicans once were.
From Master Plan to No Plan: The Slow Death of Public Higher Education | Dissent Magazine
The California student movement has a slogan that goes, Behind every fee hike, a line of riot cops. And no one embodies that connection more than the Ronald Reagan of the 1960s. Elected governor of California in 1966 after running a scorched-earth campaign against the University of California, Reagan vowed to clean up that mess in Berkeley, warned audiences of sexual orgies so vile that I cannot describe them to you, complained that outside agitators were bringing left-wing subversion into the university, and railed against spoiled children of privilege skipping their classes to go to protests. He also ran on an anti-tax platform and promised to put the states finances in order by throw[ing] the bums off welfare. But it was the University of California at Berkeley that provided the most useful political foil, crystallizing all of his ideological themes into a single figure for disorder, a subversive menace of sexual, social, generational, and even communist deviance.
When Reagan assumed office, he immediately set about doing exactly what he had promised. He cut state funding for higher education, laid the foundations for a shift to a tuition-based funding model, and called in the National Guard to crush student protest, which it did with unprecedented severity. But he was only able to do this because he had already successfully shifted the political debate over the meaning and purpose of public higher education in America. The first bums he threw off welfare were California university students. Instead of seeing the education of the states youth as a patriotic duty and a vital weapon in the Cold War, he cast universities as a problem in and of themselvesboth an expensive welfare program and dangerously close to socialism. He even argued for the importance of tuition-based funding by suggesting that if students had to pay, theyd value their education too much to protest.
Its important to remember this chapter in California history because it may, in retrospect, have signaled the beginning of the end of public higher education in the United States as wed known it.
From Master Plan to No Plan: The Slow Death of Public Higher Education | Dissent Magazine