12-04-08, 11:11 am
College tuition and fees have risen about three times as much a median family income since the Reagan administration, reported a new study this week from the Center for Public Policy and Education. The president of that center, Patrick Callan, noted that 'if this goes on for another 25 years we won't have an affordable system of higher education.' This may be a gross understatement, in my opinion, since for millions of students there isn't an affordable one now.
I have been teaching in universities since 1969. I have seen the tuition costs for students rise from a few hundred dollars a year to thousands. I have seen huge numbers of undergraduate courses since the 1980s come to be taught by part-time lecturers on a course by course basis and by graduate students, exploiting the former who function as a kind of lumpen professional class in the world of university teaching and forcing the latter to extend their graduate studies by years as they teach courses that previously were taught only by full-time faculty.
I have no great nostalgia for the 'good old days.' Universities were always filled with self aggrandizing types who operated on the Tom Sawyer principle, that is, getting associates like Huck Finn to do the teaching the way Tom got Huck to paint the fence and then take credit for it. Career academics sometimes prefer to use their talents instead to acquire research grants, outside offers from other universities and praise from strategically placed friends in order to either create and/or inflate reputations and gain huge rewards from universities where they rarely taught students, only participated in faculty governance when their immediate interests were involved, and in some cases rarely showed up.
