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there's alot that could be said about this. maybe when i'm less busy, in conjunction with others, some of those things can be said.
a cynical question: what exactly is the distinction between these and traditional universities? i mean apart from the way in which profits are used. a non-profit simply plows it into salaries---which accounts in a structural way for the mushrooming in numbers of administrators at unis during the neo-liberal period. and unis can do other things like invest massively in real estate speculation and transform city neighborhoods around them in the process. for example. and it's not like the for-profit/non-profit distinction has prevented students from being understood as consumers across the boards and administrators looking to figure ways to evaluate the "importance" of departments by the numbers of brand-loyal consumers (majors) of the intellectual Product that the department sells. suny-albany (whatever it is called now) is trying to use that logic exactly to vaporize all it's non-english language programs.
of course, these universities would never dream of vaporizing vast chunks of administration when it is administration that is deciding which chucks to vaporize.
second: it seems to me that the problem here really is that university education is not free for all in the united states. that means, like everything else to do with the system of social reproduction, the university system reproduces the class system. it also reproduces an image of mobility. but it imposes debt as a mobility tax, if you like. almost like a penalty for having the presumption to attempt not to stay in your station.
if that's the case, then the solution is perhaps a rethinking of the role of universities and the elimination of tuition altogether...
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a gramophone its corrugated trumpet silver handle
spinning dog. such faithfulness it hear
it make you sick.
-kamau brathwaite
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