<i>Saving State U: Why We Must Fix Public Higher Education</i> (review)

Abstract

Reviewed by: Saving State U: Why We Must Fix Public Higher Education Michael Cohen (bio) Saving State U: Why We Must Fix Public Higher Education By Nancy Folbre (The New Press, 2009) Campus radicalism is back, big time. For the first time in a generation, massive rallies, marches, blogs, and, increasingly, student strikes, building occupations and confrontations with the police are drawing the public’s attention to the crisis in public higher education. On March 4 of this year, rallies in 28 states and 11 different countries testified to a growing movement to reverse the now thirty-year neoliberal trend towards privatization and inequality not just in higher education but in American life in general. These growing protests have both immediate causes and long term roots. In California, where I live and teach, we are witness to the spectacle of the richest state in the country claiming that it is broke, and that billions in deficits must be made up for exclusively by cuts to schools, parks, food stamps, and other necessities of public life. These cuts have fallen hard on public higher education where the community colleges are canceling entire quarters, the California State schools are reducing enrollment by nearly 40,000 and the University of California system just raised student fees 32% while furloughing faculty and laying off 1900 unionized workers. In a shocking reminder of the state’s skewed priorities, California now has the dubious honor of spending more to incarcerate people [End Page 72] than it does to subsidize higher education. Statewide, our higher education leadership, like the state’s politicians, chirp the same failed conventional wisdom: it is the crisis! we can’t raise taxes! there is no alternative! Apparently, California’s only choice is to gut our middle class and deny college opportunities to the poor. And as goes California, so goes the nation, right? Not so, says Nancy Folbre, professor of Economics at UMass Amherst, a leading voice in feminist economics and long-time activist for public higher education. Now is the time, Folbre argues in Saving State U: Why We Must Fix Public Higher Education, for us to assert “why we need free public higher education in the United States and how we should pay for it.” Folbre’s purpose in this wide-ranging yet efficient new book is “to explain how public higher education fits into the bigger picture, to explain the strings that tie it to our understanding of global capitalism.” This large scale view affords her the opportunity to lay out a broad re-imagining of the political economy of education. A convincing reorientation towards the public aspects of economic thinking— as opposed to the self-seeking (i.e. privatized) elements— empowers Folbre to argue that public schooling is more than a form of job training or personal investment. Rather, public education is a social good, creating richer cultures, healthier people, technological dynamism, and social democracy. Having fixed our gaze on what she calls “The Big Deal,” Folbre undertakes a quick but confident discussion of a wide range of topics intersecting with higher education and public policy, beginning with the economic history of the modern university from the Progressive era to the GI Bill (“The Sweet Boom”) through the Tax Revolt and the triumph of conservatism (“The Slow Fizzle”). From there, armed equally with anecdote and data, she tackles questions about the political economy of student loans and admissions, the penetration of market values into the university’s character, the casualization of academic labor (i.e. less tenure, more adjuncts), the influence of college rankings and prestige, the complexities of state funding and public finance, and why it is so hard for most Americans to pay for and get through college right now. Of course, the brevity of the book means that many huge topics get only summary discussions. Her sense of the political is rather professorial and is limited to formal democratic practices like lobbying, campaigning and elections. She discusses leafletting parents as they help move their kids into freshmen dorms, organizing for and against ballot measures, forming acronymed faculty groups, and sharing advice on how to talk about taxation and revenues with legislators. Yet she carefully shows...