Labor Relations Commons^™

The Fiscal Crisis Of The Campus: The View From California, R. Jeffrey Lustig

Journal of Collective Bargaining in the Academy

The significance of the disinvestment in American baccalaureate, Ph.D. and community college institutions in recent years can hardly be exaggerated. The quandary posed by the attendant reduced funding goes beyond issues of crowded classrooms and dilapidated facilities; ultimately it questions whether our higher education will continue to be a gateway to equality and guarantor of opportunity, a path to broader horizons for citizens—or if it will be transformed into a bulwark of social inequality and vehicle for narrow vocational instruction.

Determining how to successfully grapple with this decline in funding is hindered, however, by the ways in which policy-makers and …

Financing Higher Education: Privatization, Resistance And Renewal, Gerald Turkel

Journal of Collective Bargaining in the Academy

The fiscal crisis of higher education currently is being resolved largely through a financing policy of privatization, a pattern that increasingly shifts responsibility to individual students and their families. The politics of privatization makes it ever more difficult for lower-income students to attend college and has become a major financial burden for middle-income people. Beyond the direct financial consequences, privatization has increasingly subordinated the research and educational missions of higher education to the countervailing imperatives of economic growth and competitiveness. Privatization has enhanced the entrepreneurial and corporate features of universities and colleges, increasingly shifting the values of higher education away …