Our University-Culture Chapter 2: How We Didn’t Get here

PREVIOUS: Introduction; Chapter 1 (Part 1); Chapter 1 (Part 2)

I. When Myths are Not Superior to History

There are two favorite myths about what is causing the problems we see in higher education. One is that tuition costs have been going up because government funding is going down. I won’t address here what is in fact causing tuition to increase, as that is a tale for another chapter, but I do want to address the myth of government funding cuts. The second myth — and there are many people on both the right and left who like to assert this — is that colleges have been dumbing down because of capitalism, because capitalism drives everything down to the lowest common denominator.

It is common knowledge that university costs have increased because of cuts in government funding. Just ask any university administrator, and they will lie right to your face that their funding has been cut. Yes, I said they will lie to your face, because they know as well as anyone that their funding has increased — perhaps not as much as they would like from time to time, but a failure to get all the increase you wanted is hardly the same thing as failing to get an increase. Paul F. Campos in the New York Times observes that the increase is in fact quite substantial:

public investment in higher…