Snip: I make that point because it’s almost impossible to have a serious discussion about this country’s economic problems without getting trapped into partisan political bickering, which is almost irrelevant in this context. The activist Tea Party right (at least in its populist, non-elite form) and the activist Occupy left are essentially reacting to the same phenomenon – worsening inequality, and the long-term economic and psychic decay of the United States – but interpreting it in different ways. Working-class whites who feel an immense loss of relative privilege and social status are not wrong, for example – but it doesn’t have much to do with the Kenyan socialist Muslim in the White House, or his namby-pamby and admittedly screwed-up healthcare law. As Nobel-winning economist Joseph Stiglitz recently noted, census data reveals that men with high-school diplomas but without college degrees earn about 40 percent less today (in real terms) than they did in the 1970s. Obama didn’t do that; capitalism did. Stiglitz concluded his essay on inequality – which argued that it was a political choice, rather than the inevitable result of macroeconomic forces – by writing that he saw us “entering a world divided not just between the haves and have-nots, but also between those countries that do nothing about it, and those that do. Some countries will be successful in creating shared prosperity — the only kind of prosperity that I believe is truly sustainable. Others will let inequality run amok.” Which kind of country do we live in? That was the question that ran through my mind this week while I was watching Frederick Wiseman’s magisterial documentary “At Berkeley,” a portrait of America’s most prestigious public university as it wrestles with piecemeal privatization and the near-total abandonment of its historic mission. New York Times columnist Paul Krugman, Stiglitz’s tag-team partner on the economic left, chimed in this week with a related argument. When the ideologues of austerity piously refuse to invest in jobs, infrastructure or education while wrapping themselves in the mantle of fiscal responsibility, he wrote, they’re actually inflicting irreparable long-term damage on the economy. Krugman’s focus in that column was primarily on job creation, but his lesson clearly applies to Wiseman’s depiction of a legendary state university that has long been considered on the same level as Harvard and Oxford and MIT and Stanford but that also, within living memory, charged no tuition at all to California high school graduates who qualified for admission. Appropriately enough, it was Ronald Reagan who did away with all that. The onetime B-movie icon ran for governor of California in 1966 promising to “clean up the mess at Berkeley,” and I can’t help wondering whether Wiseman’s title is a sly reference to that famous slogan. Reagan of course meant the Free Speech Movement and organized student opposition to the Vietnam War, which was still widely popular among the public. Once he took office in Sacramento (after defeating Democratic incumbent Pat Brown, a godfather of the University of California system and the father of current Gov. Jerry Brown), Reagan demanded that the UC regents start charging student fees for the first time. (The word “tuition” was initially avoided.) He also proposed cutting the university budget by 10 percent across the board – a sequester, as we might say today – and suggested that the regents could make up the shortfall by selling off the rare books collection in Berkeley’s Bancroft Library. No Gutenberg Bibles or first-edition Shakespeare folios were auctioned off to pay the bills at Berkeley, but that sounds an awful lot like Tea Party anti-government rhetoric circa 2013, doesn’t it? Of course Gov. Reagan presented his idea as hard-headed realism, but it’s difficult to miss the vindictiveness, or the clear ideological content: Why the hell do those eggheads need a bunch of dusty old books in languages no normal person can read, anyway? If we flash-forward to the present, the Republican-appointed bankruptcy manager of Detroit seems determined to sell off the Detroit Institute of Arts’ collection, which also feels punitive and political, rather than practical. Have people unfortunate enough to live in a bankrupt and mismanaged city forfeited the right to see Diego Rivera’s Marxist frescoes, or 15th-century Flemish religious paintings? In retrospect, I wonder whether Reagan’s assault on Berkeley wasn’t the zero moment of the conservative revolution, a magical melding of anti-elitism, anti-intellectualism and anxiety about government spending. Reagan and his supporters couldn’t understand why the Golden State’s taxpayers should fund a world-class research university, especially since it seemed to be producing radicals and dissidents in large numbers. Higher education was seen as an instrumental value, because we need to supply society with enough doctors and engineers and so forth, but never as a valuable public benefit in itself. More than four decades later, we see Berkeley chancellor Robert Birgeneau (who retired this year) tell a group of administrators and faculty leaders that state funding has fallen to 16 percent of the school’s annual budget, an all-time low. While he insists that Berkeley can find ways to maintain its “public character,” that’s almost a term of art at this point.
Posted on: Sun, 10 Nov 2013 21:05:46 +0000
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