A bill will be introduced in our state legislature’s next session to privatize our entire public university system.
Privatization
Opinions, art, debate
Opinions, art, debate
A bill will be introduced in our state legislature’s next session to privatize our entire public university system.
Clarissa's Blog 
My condolences. That these news came right after the discovery of microinvalidations seems both ironic and suitable.
Will your position be affected, if it happens? If yes, how? Will salaries of professors drop?
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So this is good news, right? Because if universities were managed like real private businesses there would be less paper-pushers in the administration and the administrators would know in which programs and faculties to invest and why.
Honestly, you know that in my view, this is horrific news.
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Ol, don’t people pushing for privatization think it’ll lead to universities being “managed like real private businesses”? What do they think and why won’t your description happen in practice?
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What I want to see is a public system of higher education that is 100% free and open to everybody.
In Illinois, however, our university has been privatized in everything but in name. We are, at this moment, not getting any money at all from the state. Moreover, in exactly 6 months, we will have a situation where university employees will be funding the state instead of the state funding the university. So I’m thinking that maybe we will be better off if we get this monkey off our collective back.
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I do not want to misquote Clarissa on this, but I think that she mentioned a couple of times that if university were managed like real businesses there would be less waste of resources.
I believe that my comments was clumsy. University should not be privatized. There should not be for profit organization. What universities could learn, however, from the private sector (in theory, because reality is far from that) is not to spend money on pointless things such as new shiny residential buildings and other assistant to assistant of the dean of undergraduate academic affairs. And its administrative assistant.
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I’ve just been on campus, talked to some colleagues, and they are all blaming not the Republican governor for our ridiculous budget situation but. . . the Democratic representatives who are trying to save the public university system. All of them! Even the colleague who is a life-long Democrat and a Bernie Sanders supporter!
As a result, the governor has a 70% approval rating in the state that he’s keeping paralyzed without a budget.
I’m sorry to have to say it, but I hate these people.
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To paraphrase,
First they came for the inner-city schools, and I said nothing…
Anybody who didn’t see this coming wasn’t paying any attention. The only unknown was which state would be first to move from the rush to privatize K-12 to privatizing the public college level.
It’s a horrible idea and I hope with all my might that it withers away in whatever state you live in legislature’s committee. But this idea will not die, it will surface again and again, here, there and yonder, until we outgrow our current mania for all things Libertarian (if indeed that happens).
This particular idea, that schools should be privatized, came from Milton Friedman. It has been tried in various places and forms, and it is always a failure. If you want to learn in more detail how it is playing out on the k-12 level, go to Diane Ravitch’s blog or read one of her recent books.
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As I said, in terms of IL, it’s not even an idea. Effectively, it’s already happened in all but in name. Right now, we are not getting any funding at all from the state. To the contrary, the university workers are beginning to fund the state with money we are supposed to find elsewhere.
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Oh man…what’s that old saying that starts with “In the history of bad ideas…”?
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The president of our university system (a.k.a. Silly Clown) is super excited about this prospect and is saying that all professors will get YOOOGE salary raises when that happens. Stupid fucker.
By the way, we stand out from other universities right now in that we don’t exploit adjuncts. We barely have any. How long does anybody think this would last when we are privatized?
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Another symptom of the vanishing nation state. Governments are openly disinvesting in education. This was completely unthinkable …. what 30? 20 years ago? and it’s happening.
I’m assumign the whole school voucher thing and charter schools and allowing homeschooling is basically prep for the government bowing out of making any pretense of being required to educate people.
The assumption is that the ‘right’ people will still get educated and any shortfalls can be made up though targeted immigration.
So education is being both privatized domestically and outsourced.
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Absolutely true.
Here is the question, though. Do you see anybody protesting? I literally feel like a voice clamoring in the desert both publicly and in private. Here on the blog, people are at least interested. Off the blog, I have a feeling that everybody is sick and tired of me trying to discuss it. My colleagues all go, “Yeah, well, I’m sure THEY know what THEY are doing”, shrug and go away.
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That is very, very weird (and not like the country I left and not in a good way).
It sounds like learned helplessness.
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I educate a couple hundred Africans a year. Shall I inform them that their openings for them in the US?
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There is a huge anti-immigrant sentiment on all sides of the political spectrum in the US right now. So I’d keep that in mind.
These anti-immigrant feeling are not really about immigrants. They are about the discomfort with an increasingly fluid world but this is how it manifests.
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This is horrible. I can’t believe that people aren’t furious with Rauner and aren’t protesting and/or walking out. Shocking and worrying.
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And why aren’t people furious with Cecile Richards who grows immensely rich on our money while destroying a crucial organization?
I think it’s the same reason. Criticizing the very rich goes against the grain. People just can’t do it.
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There are no l;imits to lunacy.
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