"The 'rogue', be it to do with elephant, tiger, lion, or hippopotamus, is the individual who does not even respect the law of the animal community, of the pack, the horde, of its kind. By its savage or indocile behavior, it stays or goes away from the society to which it belongs."

—Jacques Derrida, from The Beast and the Sovereign, Volume I translated by Geoffrey Bennington. The book launches a new series, edited by Geoffrey Bennington and Peggy Kamuf, of Derrida's unpublished lectures. In The Beast and the Sovereign, Derrida deconstructs the traditional determinations of the human through an examination of the persistent association of bestiality or animality with sovereignty in western literature.

Jacques Derrida (1930—2004) was director of studies at the École des hautes études en sciences sociales, Paris, and professor of humanities at the University of California, Irvine.

This fall, the Press published two books on the current state of the American university. Gaye Tuchman's Wannabe U: Inside the Corporate University is an eye-opening exposé of the modern university that argues that higher education's misguided pursuit of success fails us all. James C. Garland's Saving Alma Mater: A Rescue Plan for America's Public Universities, on the other hand, argues that a new compact between state government and public universities is needed to make schools more affordable and financially secure.

We asked these scholars debate the current state and future of American universities. Tuchman and Garland don't agree on much, but their conversation sheds new light on the many problems and promises of the higher education system in this country. Yesterday, Tuchman began by responding to Garland's review of her book. Today, Garland picks back up the debate on the subject of funding.

From: James C. Garland

To: Gaye Tuchman

The trouble with talking about markets is that the word itself has become so loaded. To conservatives, "markets" are the way to fight socialism and Big Government, while to liberals, they symbolize income inequality and runaway corporate malfeasance. Of course, markets are intrinsically neither good nor bad, nor are they embodied with any particular ideology. However, because market forces are very powerful they have to be structured carefully, lest they have bad unintended consequences, a recent example being Wall Street excesses.

In public higher education, market financing is usually juxtaposed against public financing. Back in the days when you and I were in college, there was no public university "market." A year's tuition for a state university was easily affordable (for example, $213 at the University of Minnesota in 1961), and the state paid for the rest. Today, as you know, tuition has grown to about $10,000 and state support has declined to about 25% of the costs.

Many people see this evolution as a de facto philosophical shift from higher education being a "public good" to its being a "private good," the former meaning that all of society benefits (from universal access to college) and the latter meaning that only individuals benefit.

For two reasons, I have long thought this to be a facile and somewhat artificial division. First, it seems to ignore the obvious truth that higher education provides both public and private benefits. There is no clean dividing line between a public and private good.

But my bigger problem with the division it that it links public and private goods to the funding source. By this reasoning, if the taxpayers pay, it is a public good, whereas if the individual pays it is a private good. Again, I see this as an artificial distinction. To me, the more relevant consideration is affordability. I don't really care if the beneficiaries "copay" for their education, so long as they can afford to do so. Unfortunately, as tuition has climbed and state support has dwindled, there is a growing segment of people who cannot make the payments.
"What will it take," you ask "to make policy makers realize that we must find a way to fund universal higher education rather than to place the burden of paying for education on the very people who are most in need?" That is indeed the key question.

But I fear we part company on how to answer it. You would redirect public funds back to universities, pass universal health care to ease campus spending on benefits, free up money by liberalizing drug laws and reducing state prison expenses, and change the public mindset that relegates higher education to a low priority in state budgets.

I would like those things too. In fact, I would like to return to the days when a year's college tuition was $213, when legislatures footed most of the expenses, and when classes were taught by full-time professors on well-maintained campuses. But those days are gone forever. There are just too many other growing demands on public treasuries to expect a return to the past.

So to me, the solution is to make the optimal use of public dollars, and that's where markets come in. Not free markets, but markets regulated to ensure the desired outcome. Since you've read my book you know that I'm recommending using public funds to give grants to needy students, rather than giving it directly to universities. There are two reasons for doing that.

First, it places the money where it will do the most good. When public money is given as an appropriation, it indirectly subsidizes all students. Today, Warren Buffet's grandchildren receive the same financial benefit as the children of young single mothers on welfare, and that just isn't right. Treating all people equally isn't the same thing as treating them fairly. And second, it creates desirable incentives for universities to respond to the needs of their grant-holding students.

Consider, for example, the federal food stamp program. This is a worthy social program in which the federal government spends public funds so needy individuals can purchase food. But now imagine a different kind of food subsidy program, in which the money would be appropriated to supermarket chains instead of needy people, the idea being for supermarkets to pass the savings on to all their customers. That would clearly be a terrible idea, because (a) it would dilute public dollars by underwriting the food expenses of those who didn't need help, and (b) it would give supermarkets an incentive to cater to wealthy customers by stocking their shelves with expensive specialty foods. Under this "revised" food subsidy program, the needy would lose purchasing power they formerly had, while the wealthy would gain it. But that’s exactly the way public higher education is now funded. The money goes to the universities, which pass along the savings to all students, whether they need it or not. And then universities build climbing walls and luxury dorms to attract even more wealthy students, since the needy students can't afford high tuition payments.

My proposal would change this system by giving needy students more purchasing power. Universities would now have incentives to be more responsive to their needs. In fact, the universities that would benefit most by my proposal are the regional, non-selective campuses that enroll large numbers of low- and middle-income students. The new system would benefit such schools, because their students would be armed with need-based grants that would more than reimburse their campuses for the loss of public subsidy. Thus "market forces," would decrease educational inequities by empowering precisely those people who cannot now afford the high price of college. The full picture is more complicated (which is why I wrote a book on the subject), but basically, my proposal would reshape incentives to accomplish the end goals that I believe both of us consider worthy.

So how do you think Wannabe U would react if it faced the prospects of losing its state subsidy (over, say, a six-year period) and knew that the only way it could make up the loss was by making itself more desirable to low- and middle-income students? (Keep in mind that the same total dollars would be going to public universities in the state, but the universities couldn't count automatically on receiving the money.)

How do you believe Wannabe U would respond to this challenge? How would the faculty respond if the university started recruiting more low- and middle-income students? How would the change impact classes and the campus environment? Would Wannabe U stop being a "conformist" university by trying to compete with the Berkeleys of the country, which cater to well-prepared upper income students? What do you think the reaction of the University Senate would be?

So whether one identifies higher education as a public good matters, too. To be sure, my education benefits both me and the country, just as your education helped you to earn more and was certainly useful to the citizens of Ohio. But I suspect that legislatures are more willing to fund someone who will use her education to serve our country’s needs (public good) than to finance an education that will permit someone to earn a boodle (private good). Let’s return to the notion that education is a public good that helps both our country and its citizens to survive in an ever more complex world. The rebirth of that concept might help legislatures to fund education for more students who are working-class or are members of racial and ethnic minorities. I know that we both want to see more of those students in colleges and universities, because we both know that America no longer leads the world in the proportion of its citizens who graduate college. Also, as Paul Attewell and David Lavin have demonstrated in Passing the Torch, higher education for the less advantaged pays off across the generations—not just for the newly educated and their children, but for all of us. I cannot see either state legislatures or Congress pouring funds into a private good.

That said, we also disagree on whether people should fund students or fund colleges and universities. You asked how Wannabe University would fare under your plan. Just fine, thank you. Wannabe is a first-tier university with selective admission. It does not struggle to find students; it is not about to close its doors. However, even with a lot of financial assistance, working-class students are less likely to be admitted to Wannabe U than to either a state college or a community college. On the whole, upper-middle class kids get better grades and SAT scores than students in the working class and enough of them want to attend Wannabe for its Vice Provost for Enrollment to feel secure in Wannabe’s survival (and his job). Admitting better students and achieving a high yield-rate may even “cause” more upper-middle class to want to attend Wannabe.

Not so the struggling college down the street. Suppose it barely meets its enrollment quota and most of its students are working-class or lower-middle class. (In sociology, there is no such thing as a middle-middle class.) With public monies in hand, working-class students may look for a better place to go. If enough of them find that better place, Struggling State College and Struggling Private College may fold. I fear that many colleges now devoted to working-class and minority students will fold. Hard-put to attract students now, they will probably wind up in an even worse position. Maybe those struggling colleges should fold. But then where are those students going to go?

In essence, you are proposing an extension of the Pell Grant program that funded students, not schools; only now needy students would supposedly get enough money to fund their education. Over the years, Pell grants have not been able to keep up with the increasing cost of a college education. The cost of college has increased quicker than the Pell grants. Equally important, institutions of higher education have been shifting scholarships toward merit-based grants. Although Boards of Trustees use formulas to determine whether they are pricing an education out of the reach of the working class, they are not about to eliminate merit-based scholarships. I cannot see either Miami University or Wannabe University doing so. Those smart and wealthy kids simply do the selective colleges too much good. And their parents are going to remind legislators that these meritorious kids deserve a scholarship too.

Wannabe U might flourish, but I’m not quite sure that the students will. Funding students, not schools, makes the “customer” the real power in the educational process and encourages colleges and universities to cater to them. Giving the students what they want may further obfuscate the difference between teaching students and making them think that the university “cares about them.”

For decades, Wannabe U has needed a new infirmary. The building that houses Student Health Services is just too small and too outdated. Best practices reveal that students really care about working out; the Wannabe U recreational facilities are outdated, too. Since Wannabe U is dedicated to showing students that it cares, it will build a new field house before it constructs a new infirmary. When high school students and their parents visit campus on those pre-application tours, they may want to check out the field house, but they don’t plan on their kids getting sick. Treating students as customers—giving them the money not the colleges and universities—will help Wannabe U to justify more attention to a facility to house intramural basketball games than one to preserve student health. Certainly students are entitled to some power over their lives; we all are. But what will happen to universities when the customer [the student] is always right?

Jim, it’s pretty romantic that I would like to return to the days when schools did not charge tuition. But I think that you’re being pretty romantic too. That emphasis on the individual’s choice implicit in your proposal might very well come at the expense of the public good. And it’s not going to help us return to a day when the people who fund colleges and universities valued education, not training. Will the day ever return when the corporatizing colleges and universities of the United States give more than a cursory nod to the arts, humanities and social sciences, not just to the fields that build revenue streams?

From: James C. Garland

To: Gaye Tuchman

Whether public higher education is a private or public good, or a mixture of both (as I believe), is unfortunately a topic that interests scholars more than elected officials. In my interactions with dozens if not hundreds of state representatives and senators over the past thirty years, I think it is fair to say that the vast majority already understand that “education is a public good that helps our country and its citizens to survive in an ever more complex world.” Where you and I differ is in your conviction that “the rebirth of that concept might help legislatures to fund education for more students who are working-class or are members of racial and ethnic minorities.” The concept doesn’t need to be reborn. It’s already very much alive. It just isn’t shaping any legislative behavior.
Your belief is a variation on a theme that won’t die—that if higher education advocates could only express their needs more eloquently and persuasively, if only they could show more clearly how financial support of universities serves the national interest, if only they could convince elected officials how educating the needy would alleviate a whole host of social ills, then finally—finally!—government priorities would change and public universities and colleges might be able to fulfill their vast potential for good.

This is a theory that, however noble, unfortunately is mostly a waste of time and money. It is the theory that drives public universities to hire lobbyists, that causes presidents to write op-ed pieces pleading for more money, that sends university officials off to Washington to campaign for more federal support. The problem is that this strategy has been used for half a century and it just hasn’t worked. It hasn’t worked in blue states, where elected officials are philosophically sympathetic to helping the working class and the needy, and it hasn’t worked in red states where officials want government to stay out of the way and let personal initiative thrive.

The reason “getting the message out” doesn’t translate into increased support of public universities is not because the message isn’t believed. It’s because the message is irrelevant to the day-to-day workings of government. Elected officials mostly live in the present, where they face problems of tremendous complexity and challenge. To them, the needs of higher education have to be juxtaposed against the needs of the poor, of the elderly, of police and fire departments, of K-12 education, of roads, of Medicaid, and on and on. Most of these areas of social need have no other means of support other than taxpayer dollars. Higher education, by contrast, also has income from tuition, federal grants, and other sources, so when public money is running out, as it nearly always is, the needs of universities are inevitably subordinated to more immediate pressing needs. You and I can rail against this fact of life as much as we want, but there is nothing we can do to change it. For half a century higher education authorities have been flogging a dead horse. To me, the lesson of history is that it is time to try a different strategy.
This is the context that leads me to propose that public funds be directed to students rather than to universities. (Please keep in mind this is only part of my proposal!) When public money is given as a subsidy, half of it is wasted on people who do not need it. With tuition as high as it is now, and campuses as dilapidated as they are now, the nation can’t afford to keep frittering away public dollars.

As to whether redirecting money to students would cause universities to build recreation centers instead of infirmaries, I think we can look at private universities for guidance. Private universities balance student desires with genuine needs quite ably, and I see no reason why the publics couldn’t also. In fact, more so than today, since with the current funding mechanism there is no financial incentive for public universities to spend dollars strategically. Instead, they spend hundreds of millions of dollars on sports facilities, student centers, low income housing developments, conference and hotel complexes, and other things that are not central to their educational mission.

My great fear, Gaye, is that in the end nothing will change, and that there will be no systemic reform of public higher education. Your crystal ball is as clear as mine, so let me ask you to look into the future twenty years or so. What do you imagine Wannabe U will be like if all the current trends continue? Your concerns are mostly with the “corporatization” of the university and its impact on academic life. I see “corporatization” (more accountability, greater focus on alternate revenue sources, a growing shadow faculty of poorly paid contingent teachers) as mostly symptoms of an underlying chronic disease. Unless the disease is cured the symptoms are only going to get worse.

You and I won’t be participants in public higher education in twenty years. I for one will be quite content then to sit on my deck, sipping a margarita and watching the Santa Fe sun set behind the Sangre de Cristo mountains. When that day comes, you and I will be doing just fine. But I fear for my children and grandchildren if their country’s higher education system is allowed to wither and die in the intervening decades.

From: Gaye Tuchman

To: James C. Garland

Ah, Jim. In twenty years, Wannabe University will be just fine—sort of. Still struggling for money, it will cut and paste budgets, pressure professors to do funded research on topics that might produce patents, show its concern for students as consumers, and express its devotion to the economic future of its state. Perhaps Wannabe U will fly huge banners, each with a picture of a celebrated professor or basketball player from street lights, as does the University of Arizona. After all, Arizona’s practice makes Wannabe U’s introduction of top grant-getters to trustees seem like almost no recognition at all. Perhaps Wannabe U will eliminate some costly foreign language programs. Since English is the language of international business, why should students learn Arabic or even Chinese? Perhaps Wannabe U is not the issue, but only the example. The real issue remains: what are the consequences of the corporatization of colleges and universities for higher education today?

This fall, the Press published two books on the current state of the American university. Gaye Tuchman's Wannabe U: Inside the Corporate University is an eye-opening exposé of the modern university that argues that higher education's misguided pursuit of success fails us all. James C. Garland's Saving Alma Mater: A Rescue Plan for America's Public Universities, on the other hand, argues that a new compact between state government and public universities is needed to make schools more affordable and financially secure.

Last month, Garland reviewed Tuchman's book on his blog. We asked Tuchman to respond to Garland, and what follows is a long conversation about the current state and future of American universities. Tuchman and Garland don't agree on much, but their debate sheds new light on the many problems and promises of the higher education system in this country. What follows is the first half of the exchange. The conclusion will be posted tomorrow.

From: Gaye Tuchman
To: James C. Garland

I read your comments on my book with amusement and despair. Sometimes the same passage prompted both feelings. So, I wind up amused that a bright fellow like you did not understand that I was not condemning—or even criticizing—individual administrators or even the Wannabe U administrators. And I despair when a physicist, who presumably studies patterns, cannot understand that social scientists study patterns too.

I'm merely trying to describe the patterns that I've seen at Wannabe University and to say what I think they mean. The quote from C. Wright Mills (on the page across from the Table of Contents) captures how sociologists think: "Caught in the limited milieu of their everyday lives, ordinary men [and women] often cannot reason about the great social structures—rational and irrational—of which their lives are a subordinate part. Accordingly, they often carry out series of apparently rational actions without any idea of the ends they serve." My job is to study patterns and figure out what they mean. I also teach students about patterns, including how in recent years an exaltation of market forces seems to have meant that the rich have been increasing their share of the wealth and the poor have indeed been getting poorer.

Your blog post suggests that you do not accept that sociologists study patterns. As you put it, "Sociologists see the world differently from most folks. They see patterns everywhere. A friendly pat on the shoulder establishes dominance; the celery sticks on an hors d'oeuvres tray mark the lowly status of the retiree. Who speaks first, who interrupts whom, who sits where, who has a wood desk and an office on the second floor—all of these are 'tells' about power and status, who's up and who's down, and what's in and what's out."

My guess is that the patterns that physicists study are harder to see. (I've never seen a photon collide with anything, and I haven't studied physics since an awesome course in high school.) But at least the photons don't talk back, deny that their behavior is patterned or alter their behavior because they've read what you've written and want to prove you wrong. All of us engage in patterned behavior. If what we said and did was genuinely idiosyncratic, our well-meaning family and friends would have mumbled about our egocentricities and sent us off for medical care. So, the penthouse overlooking the East River costs more than an apartment that is just as large, but on the third floor. The office of the dean is larger and furnished much better than the assistant professor's office, and the university president probably has a more expensive desk than the executive assistant who reports to him [or her]. And sometimes men pat one another on the shoulder when they enter a room; women rarely do that.

When a sociologist uses ethnography to find out how a phenomenon or a process works, one key is selecting a good case. Although the exception does tell us something about the rule, it's often easier to locate patterns that matter by examining a typical case. As best as I can tell, Wannabe University is pretty typical. Our administrators seem pretty typical and our professors do too. Trying to transform complicated variables into simple measures seems pretty typical. Even the food court in the Student Union and the increasing percentage of courses taught by the contingent labor force seem pretty typical.

What I can't understand is: Why do all these administrators think it's great to ape the flaws of corporations and to transform complicated issues into simplistic and often phony metrics and also to objectify students as products? I had always wanted to think that administrators are smarter than that. Why do universities try so hard to be just like everyone else? Suppose that all of the chemistry departments are measuring themselves against the Berkeley department and all of the economics departments are measuring themselves against either Chicago or MIT. If all those departments are striving to be the same—only much better than average—how is anyone ever going to find out something genuinely new?

Years ago I dated a smart, attractive woman named Kim, and things seemed to be going well until one evening we had an argument about whether my miniature black poodle, Lucy, truly liked me. Kim's position was that dogs felt no emotional attachment to humans. Rather, over the eons, dogs had learned to mimic the patterns humans associate with affection in order to promote their self-interest. Humans deduced that face-licking, lap-sitting, waggy tails, and excited greetings meant dogs were their friends only because that's what they wanted to believe. In fact, inside that curly poodle head lurked the mind of a cunning, cold-hearted opportunist. As far as I was concerned, that was the end of Kim.

But in truth she had a point. The only way one can tell what a dog or anybody else is really thinking is to view the world through their eyes. Anything else is just a guess, and we are prone to guessing wrong because of our own biases and because we're usually not aware of how limited and incomplete our own view is.

When I was in grad school, one of my idols was Cal Tech physicist Richard Feynman. Feynman's Nobel acceptance speech made a deep impression on me. In it he explained that to understand the world (in his case, the world of quantum electrodynamics) one has to look at it from as many perspectives as possible. Each new perspective, he said, fills in missing pieces, clarifies ambiguities, and corrects faulty assumptions and wrong conclusions. Only when one's perspective is sufficiently encompassing, Feynman believed, can one have a balanced understanding that exposes the complexity of the world, with all its nuances and shades of grey. I suspect you can see where I'm headed with this.

Wannabe U looks at the patterns in administrators' behavior, and I am sure you have accurately recorded the face-licking, lap-sitting, and tail wagging part. But the problem for me is that you've been peeking into administrators' offices through a clouded window. You've never actually been on the other side of the glass to get a clear view, and that's too bad. Had you spent a few years as a dean or provost or president, I'm pretty sure you'd have written a different book.

To be on both sides of the glass is why most senior "wannabe corporate managers" are also professors. Having taught classes, written books, advised students, and served on faculty committees in their earlier life gives them a balanced perspective that helps them do their job better. They know what it's like to see the world through the eyes of a faculty member because they've been there.

Why, you wonder, "do all these administrators think it's great to ape the flaws of corporations and to transform complicated issues into simplistic and often phony metrics and also to objectify students as products?" You go on to say, "I had always wanted to think that administrators are smarter than that."

Well, surprise! They are smarter than that. However, your question and the way it's framed say more about your preconceptions than about the people you hold in such low regard. But let's get specific.

We'll consider the U.S. News college rankings, and the game-playing that sometimes accompanies the push for higher ratings. I know you hate that, and so do I, and so does everybody else, even those who do it. All administrators whom I know despise these rankings and are acutely aware not only of their shortcomings (they measure market strength, not academic quality), but also their adverse social consequences. As Robert Zemsky observes in his new book, Making Reform Work: The Case for Transforming American Higher Education, "The rankings have become the scorecard of an admissions arms race that has encouraged a spiraling competition for students and faculty that, over the last twenty-five years, has dramatically escalated the cost of an undergraduate education."

But now, let's do a gedankenexperiment and imagine for a moment that you're on the other side of the window inside the administration building, looking out over the campus. You're the new president of Wannabe U, and you've just read a report about an unexpected enrollment shortfall. Applications are down, as are freshman class numbers. Furthermore, faculty members report that a large number of entering students are poorly prepared and need costly remedial classes.

As you finish reading the report, you receive a phone call from your admissions director. Applicant interviews, she says, confirm that a major cause of the decline is that Wannabe U's ranking in U.S. News has slipped eight places, while those of peer universities have gone up. "You've got to do something to turn this around," she says. "The damn U.S. News rankings are killing us."

You don't need your C.F.O. to tell you that declining enrollment translates into lost tuition revenue and state subsidy, which will likely mean faculty hiring freezes, layoffs of the classified staff, decreased morale, and canceled courses. Worse still, if this is the beginning of a chronic slide, the consequences will be catastrophic. You get a sick feeling in your stomach when you realize this isn't your staff's problem to solve. It is your problem. No buck-passing allowed.

And so, President Tuchman, how are you going to solve this problem? Are you going to take the high road and just ignore U.S. News and its flawed and misleading rankings? Before you answer, however, let me suggest you spend a few minutes looking out over the campus and thinking about all those smart junior faculty members in their crowded offices who are just launching their careers. And about all the groundskeepers and receptionists and staff employees who are struggling to afford rent payments and worrying about health care for their children. And don't forget to reflect on the thousands of Wannabe U students who have placed their educational dreams in your hands. (Does it feel to you like you are "objectifying them, like products?") All these people are counting on you to help them.

The burden of responsibility on one's shoulders forever changes one's view of the world, but it doesn't distort the view. Rather it makes it clearer, because it reveals the tradeoffs. For Wannabe U's administrators that messy world is a noisy, whirlwind, exhausting place where doing the "right thing" sometimes means that babies get divided. It is a place where compromises can prevail over untarnished virtue, where taking the high road can sometimes be the sure path to disaster, and where the eleventh commandment is "Thou shalt not don the cloak of self-righteousness." I am looking forward to your answer.

P.S. You actually have seen photons collide. In fact you're seeing them collide right now, by the zillions.

From: Gaye Tuchman
To: James C. Garland

I heard a howl rising slowly from the page. It's baying: "Because you have never been an administrator, you can't understand what it's like to be an administrator." Or, to invoke the old folk-saying: "Never judge an administrator until you've walked a mile in his black loafers [or her comfortable heels]." Frankly, I hate that question, but not because I don't know a decent answer. Rather, the question suggests that there are so many limitations to human empathy that we can never hope to know one another, let alone to understand people from different times and places. We might as well dismiss attempts to write about medieval Chinese history, how Native Americans viewed the invading European colonists, and how members of Afghan tribes view the Taliban, not even to speak of how dogs see humans. (My colleague Clint Sanders studies dog-human interaction and tells me that my pugs will obey me better if I act like an alpha-male, the leader of the pack.)

Frankly, I don't know what I would do if I were President of Wannabe University. A reporter recently asked me that question only he wanted me to pretend to be "President of Higher Education." (Since being Secretary of Education pays better than my current position and might permit me to abolish student-outcomes assessment, I might be tempted to take that job.) I know that the administrators whom I have respected have generally liked people, had an extraordinary ability to size up people, have tended to forget colleagues' worst traits until rudely reminded of them, and have been honest. They have cared about helping people, not about wielding power. We've never met, but you seem to be one of the honest, service-oriented administrators. I fear you are a dying breed and I regret that you and other service-oriented administrators may have read my work as a personal attack. I did not write Wannabe U to attack any administrators, not even the power-hungry who bounce from one university to the next. As one of my favorite deans reminds me, the president of a university also makes decisions under constraints.

For me, the real question is: What's happening to American society? I want people to think about the de-churching of higher education, "one of the last revered American institutions … to have its ideological justification recast in terms of corporatization and commodification and to become subject to serious state surveillance." As happened in the health care industry, an interventionist state is "demanding accountability and is decentering the professionals" who once taught in and led universities. It is doing so to guard its investment and its people and also to guarantee economy, efficiency, and effectiveness.

To fix Wannabe University and all of the other colleges and universities that are struggling to stay afloat I would have to be the President of the United States. Our public universities are starving for funds and they have been malnourished for decades now. Increasingly, public funds are going elsewhere as market forces define what matters. Were I President, I certainly would pass universal health care with the public option. Let's decrease the cost of health care so that universities have more money to spend on classes, rather than on fringe benefits. Let's revise the laws that criminalize all drugs and mandate harsh sentences. I would rather educate people than pay for their incarceration. Let's insist that higher education is a public good and so reintroduce tuition-free colleges. We know how very much our country benefited from such schools as the City College of New York, which in its tuition-free days seemed to have churned out Nobel Prize winners.

Such federal, state, and local investments in education as a public good increasingly matter. We no longer have the most educated population in the world. There are significant disparities by race/ethnicity, gender, and social class in who enters, who stays, and who graduates college. I suppose I could rejoice that my own group, upper-middle class white women who attend selective schools, has the highest graduation rate, but my celebration would not serve the country very well. We both know that increasingly the United States is a multiracial society and that sometime this century white people will be the demographic minority.

At the turn of the twentieth century, some states realized that educating the children of European immigrants would benefit everyone and they invested scarce monies in higher education. What will it take to make policy makers realize that we must find a way to fund universal higher education rather than to place the burden of paying for education on the very people who are most in need?

I know you have strong feelings about this topic. (I've read your book.) Is there a way to get that funding without invoking market forces, which fund students rather than universities? I fear that your plan would exacerbate inequalities. The non-selective four-year colleges and community colleges that are most likely to educate working class and minority youth are the very colleges that are most likely to fail. When I think about the possibility that market forces might dominate higher education I see a great banner in the sky: "Market forces … from the people who brought you the great recession."

Soldier Field, as sports fans nationwide know, is the home of the Chicago Bears. For decades its signature columns provided an iconic backdrop for gridiron matches. But few realize that the stadium has been much more than that. Ford's book Soldier Field: A Stadium and Its City explores how this amphitheater evolved from a public war memorial into a majestic arena that helped define Chicago.

Chicago Tribune staff writer Ford led the reporting on the stadium's controversial 2003 renovation—and simultaneously found himself unearthing a dramatic history. As he tells it, the tale of Soldier Field truly is the story of Chicago, filled with political intrigue and civic pride. Designed by Holabird and Roche, Soldier Field arose through a serendipitous combination of local tax dollars, City Beautiful boosterism, and the machinations of Mayor "Big Bill" Thompson. The result was a stadium that stood at the center of Chicago's political, cultural, and sporting life for nearly sixty years before the arrival of Walter Payton and William "The Refrigerator" Perry.

Ford describes it all in the voice of a seasoned reporter: the high school football games, track and field contests, rodeos, and even NASCAR races. Photographs, including many from the Chicago Park District's own collections, capture these remarkable scenes: the swelling crowds at ethnic festivals, Catholic masses, and political rallies. Few remember that Soldier Field hosted Billy Graham and Martin Luther King Jr., Judy Garland and Johnny Cash—as well as Grateful Dead's final show. Soldier Field captures this history in the making and will captivate armchair historians and sports fans alike.

Check out his interview with Allison Payne below!

Galbraith years later created a furor at his alma mater [Ontario Agricultural College] by referring to it in a Time interview as in his youth “not only the cheapest but probably the worst college in the English-speaking world.” There was much angry talk in Guelph about rescinding the honorary degree he'd been given as “OAC's greatest living alumnus” … Galbraith eventually backtracked, but only slightly, claiming that his comment applied to OAC in his undergraduate years and that he would allow that Arkansas A&M was no doubt worse, although there was some question whether English was spoken there.

John Kenneth Galbraith (1908-2006) was a Canadian-American economist whose bestselling books like The Affluent Society and The New Industrial State made him one of the most famous public intellectuals writing on the economic issues of the twentieth century.

The Chicago Tribune's cultural critic Julia Keller has yet another quotable review of a great new title from the University of Chicago Press. This time Keller offers an insightful critique of Philip Graham's new travel memoir documenting his year-long sojourn in Portugal with his family in The Moon, Come to Earth: Dispatches from Lisbon. Originally published as a series of dispatches that first appeared on the McSweeney's website as "Philip Graham Spends a Year in Lisbon," his new book is an expanded version of those essays that, as Keller writes, offers readers "the chance to travel alongside the Graham family as they explore a city, a language, a culture and, of course, themselves." Keller's review begins:

Ask me to peruse your vacation snapshots and I'll probably do so, but reluctantly, and not without an inward wince.

Ask me to listen to your vacation stories—or better yet, to read them—and I'll happily oblige.

Photos are simple and static and crudely bullying; they force you to see things from a single, inert perspective. Stories, though, are complex, supple and surprising. That's why The Moon, Come to Earth: Dispatches from Lisbon is so enchanting: It dances and sighs. It twitches and hums and stumbles and then rights itself, with a winsome smile. It's like a living thing, filled with desire and uncertainty and joy and regret.

Continue reading Keller's review on the Chicago Tribune website. Also read an excerpt and see the author's website.

"To say I was in love will vex the reader beyond endurance, but he must remember that being in love had a peculiar meaning for me. … It meant a desire to lay my personality at someone's feet as a puppy deposits a slobbery ball; it meant a non-stop daydream, a planning of surprises, an exchange of confidences, a giving of presents, an agony of expectation, a delirium of impatience, ending with the premonition of boredom more drastic than the loneliness which it set out to cure."

Cyril Connolly (1903—74) the author of Enemies of Promise, was one of the most influential critics of his time, who wrote for such publications as the New Statesman, the Observer, and the Sunday Times.