“SOCIALIST” EDUCATION
(In response to Leandra Huffer’s Oct. 25 article, “Students hold Occupy demonstration on Tempe campus.”)
"Perceived dilution of the quality of education?" When you live in a country, and especially in a state that is anti-tax, anti-socialism (i.e. government-funded anything), anti-publicly funded education, state and federal contributions to public universities are consistently, annually getting their budgets demolished.
Then they are replaced with "private" contributions, privatization of anything/everything that can be in an institution of higher learning, and the quality of one's education they are receiving will be diminished.
This is not a perception, these are the realities of the privatization (proftization) of an institution by which its one and only goal is to educate.
With class sizes always increasing, more and more classes moving to online only and students taking classes online (to cut costs for the university), "furlough days" for the professors, professors who are essentially at-will employees due to the ongoing, consistent denial of tenure, the list goes on and on.
These facts, along with the privatization of certain areas of a university and reliance on private (for-profit) dollars to fill in what the public used to fund result in an assembly line mentality of students, professors, and administrators churning out as many widgets (degrees/customers) as possible.
An institution of higher learning has no business colluding with for-profit dollars to fund the university. The profit motive is in direct conflict with an institution of higher learning where the only objective is to teach, educate, expand one's mind.
ASU by the day is becoming a for-profit corporation rather than a university that creates and shapes human beings who care about one another and Mother Earth as much as the all-mighty dollar.
Brian Simpson Alumnus
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