REPUBLICAN GREED K THROUGH PhD

Budget cuts for higher education advances the industrialization of our universities.  University administrators have to have money to fund the educational mission of their schools. This plays into the hands of the industrialist who give research grants to university professors to do their patentable research. It is true that the grants pay overhead money that goes into the general fund of the universities. There are serious problems with the system and they are getting worse. Look at the situation at, a board of industrialist discharged President Sullivan because she was not aggressively getting them more money. I don’t know but, because it smacks of immorality, there has to be at least one MBA mixed up in it somewhere.

They want the university administrators to sell out to industry for overhead funds from grants even though they know that overhead funds do not cover the entire cost of the research. The administrators hide the costs from the public by distributing them over a number of factors some of which are not monetary—creative book keeping. The reason industrialist want to do their research in a university setting should be obvious. If the CEOs did not increase their bottom line, they would hire the researchers to do the work in their industrial laboratories rather then close them.

The cost:

• Part of the professor’s salary.
• Fringe benefits (pension, health insurance, etc)
• The workspace and utilities
• If the research is not productive, the university pays useless non-teaching professor.
• Research professors create disproportionate student faculty ratios.

• Tuition goes up to pay for the professors.
• Class size increase because there are too few professors to actual teach.
• Unqualified inexperienced teaching assistants teach important classes.
• Etcetera

This put the economic squeeze on students and their parents but now industrialization is putting the squeeze on all taxpayers. By the way, another group of Republicans are going to double the interest on students loans. Their greed knows no bounds. The Republicans are asking state legislatures to cut taxpayers appropriation to the universities, which will induce more tuition hikes, larges classes, less teaching, etcetera. They do not want to pay for public K through 12 and now they do not want to pay for 12 to PhD education. Their greed has blinded their logic.