I hear it again and again, even from some pro-business conservatives:Hey, I have no sympathy for AIG and the automakers and the banks. When you take government money, you can expect the government to tell you what to do. Besides, some of these companies are wasteful, charge too much, and their salaries are too high.Well, if that's so, then why doesn't the government intervene to run our universities, which consume huge amounts of government money? Why don't President Barack Obama and the Democratic Congress dictate marching orders to university presidents? Why not fire the bad ones? Why aren't Barney Frank and Chris Dodd calling in provosts to explain themselves?
Truman couldn't nationalize the steel industry during the Korean War, why can Obama nationalize the car industry? If you can justify the take-over of the car industry but the above suggestion seems just silly, I'm curious to know why.
2 comments:
Well being a libertarian I agree with the author, although I had never thought of it. If I had to come up with a response it would be something along the lines of presidence. The govt has long given money to schools and it only "runs" them so far as it sets standards (ie. accreditation), And education has long been a sacred realm. it is different from car/insurance companies in that its training people to be skilled in areas the country needs.
I see lots of holes in those arguments but thats what came to mind.
Being that the University of Arizona was getting a big chunk of change from the government....we were to obey strict rules. ex: specific health care on the university, rules about how the faculty is to respond to students, random things like that. if we change something (we changed our healthcare benefits this year) we loose money, and we lost ALOT because we weren't obeying the government. And new this week: we're losing even more funding due to economy, so we're going to start changing alot of rules, including the student government and the amount of say they have and what they're in charge of.
so i believe that universities are being controlled (in some ways) by the government by taking federal money....but some colleges more than others. University of Arizona is under MUCH MORE scrutiny than Sacramento State for example
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