The New York Times informs us that the leading “private,” for-profit educational companies get the vast majority of their reported revenues from public sources:

The Career Education Corporation, a publicly traded global giant, last year reported revenue of $1.84 billion. Roughly 80 percent came from federal loans and grants, according to BMO Capital Markets, a research and trading firm. That was up from 63 percent in 2007.

The Apollo Group — which owns the for-profit University of Phoenix — derived 86 percent of its revenue from federal student aid last fiscal year, according to BMO. Two years earlier, it was 69 percent.

These numbers are far higher than most of the ones I have seen for the percentage of public funding in public university budgets, and it is notorious that the levels of government support for higher education have been dropping. What we seem to have here is a massive transfer of public funds from major educational institutions where there is some public control and scrutiny of its use, into corporate pockets where its use and outcomes become proprietary information shared only in advertising and financial reports. It turns out that the risks these brave educational entrepreneurs have run — such as loaning tens of thousands to culinary students whose  future careers as dishwashers or line cooks or sawers of novelty ice sculptures can never possibly allow them to pay back their massive student loan debts — are considerably surer things when the federal government backs the loans. Students pay, Feds pay, Career Edu Corp profits either way.

So the next time some politician or pundit tells us we should run the universities more like businesses, the answer should be, give us more taxpayer money, and maybe we will give you a few email addresses of former students to tell you how much they loved us. (As the companies did in this story.)

[Hat tip on the post title to Citizen Freneau.]

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Now playing: The Soundtrack of Our Lives – The Passover

I can’t say this connection had occurred to me consciously, but it made only too much sense to see that in one suburb, at least,  two outsized, fearful items of modern conspicuous consumption have converged: Hummers and assault weapons. It does indeed seem to take a similar mentality to think that suburban personal safety requires driving to the supermarket in an armored personnel carrier and that personally acquiring enough munitions to capture Iwo Jima is a good idea. And to regard living that way as somehow cool and manly. But let the St. Louis Post-Dispatch tell it:

Chesterfield Hummer dealership fights declining sales with guns

Like many of his competitors, Hummer dealer Jim Lynch is fighting for survival.

Unlike the rest of them, Lynch reached for a gun. Lots of them, actually.

Faced with declining sales and an uncertain future, his Chesterfield dealership has expanded in a direction that’s drawing national attention. It’s what happens when you replace some of those pricey Hummers with dozens of Glocks, Sig Sauers, Colts, Berettas and Brownings.

For Lynch, those guns are the solution to a problem that’s been hounding him for months.

“We’ve got a beautiful building with a big mortgage,” Lynch said. “The Hummers weren’t going to cover it.”

In the good old days — way back in 2005 — Lynch’s dealership could sell 70 Hummers during a strong month. But high gas prices, a sour economy and the auto industry’s ongoing struggles have wreaked havoc. These days, he’s happy to watch 10 of the gas-guzzling sport utility vehicles leave the lot. But the money he pockets selling guns makes up for the profit on about 15 Hummers.

But why guns? Why not flowers? Or lawn mowers? Or jewelry?

That’s easy. The people who like Hummers also tend to like guns.

The story goes on rather matter-of-factly from there, with the dealer, his customers, and even a Marketing professor from Philadelphia treating guns-n-Hummers as the most natural thing in the world, which I suppose it is, at least in this part of it.

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Now playing: Jon Auer – Six Feet Under
via FoxyTunes

Two articles in the NYT are worthy of attention as the impact of the economic crisis spreads.

First, Michael Powell and Janet Roberts, in “Minorities Hit Hardest by Foreclosures in New York,” do a great job describing the foreclosure crisis in the NYC metropolitan area.  They also nicely situate their story in the social and economic developments of the last 30-60 years or so.

If all this economic pain still seems rather abstract to you, then turn to the first-person account by Edmund L. Andrews, “My Personal Credit Crisis,” in this weekend’s magazine section.  Sure, it’s an in-house book promotion, but it also nicely captures the psychological effects of this kind of financial pain.  Take the emotions from Andrews and map them onto the larger-scale developments in the Powell/Roberts article, and it really brings home the power and viciousness of the recession.

I am normally a great defender of most things academic, but here is a case where I am not finding typical academic behavior all that helpful in a public figure. Is it just me, or is Paul Krugman sounding more and more like a senior faculty member pursuing an academic grudge?  There have been so many columns and posts over the past few months where Krugman’s overriding question seems to be: whose faction had the correct economic analysis (and underlying theory), his or Larry Summers’s, and when did they have it? For instance, from the most recent column, we have the following:

Only a few people warned that this supercharged financial system might come to a bad end. Perhaps the most notable Cassandra was Raghuram Rajan of the University of Chicago, a former chief economist at the International Monetary Fund, who argued at a 2005 conference that the rapid growth of finance had increased the risk of a “catastrophic meltdown.” But other participants in the conference, including Lawrence Summers, now the head of the National Economic Council, ridiculed Mr. Rajan’s concerns.

And the meltdown came.

While I tend to agree with Krugman that the Krugmanian economists had a more clear-eyed view of the recent finance-driven economy than the Summersians, the most important task now would be seem to be restablizing the economy rather than hashing out who was right in the past. Krugman has been holding a kind of endless academic roundtable session, only it’s happening in what is probably the nation’s leading liberal newspaper column rather than in the hotel ballroom where it belongs.

Reader BMC insists that I post on this clip from the Rachel Maddow show.  (If you want to know what all the snickering is about, I’d suggest consulting an online slang dictionary, and I’m not responsible for what you find.)

I think the easiest thing to do would be to start picking out all the bad historical analogies and use it as an excuse to guffaw at the “Tea Party” movement that’s scheduled to demonstrate on April 15, 2009 (tax filing day).  But I’m not going to do that–instead I’m going to try and be even-handed about this, and see if there’s anything to this grassroots conservative invocation of the Boston Tea Party.

Unfortunately, the ideology behind all of this seems rather vague.  For instance, here’s what the website TaxDayTeaParty.com says on its front page:

The Tea Party effort is just a small piece of a much larger movement aimed at restoring the basic free-market principles our country was built on. The Constitution, for the most part, is being ignored by our current government and we intend on working together to correct the problem.

The Tea Party effort is a grassroots, collaborative volunteer organization made up of every day American citizens from across the country. We take pride in the fact that we’ve built a 50 state network of leaders and activists using nothing more than the internet, a few websites and a burning desire to restore freedom.

There’s not much there: the protesters are in favor of “basic free-market principles” and “freedom.”  (Well, me too!)  The site doesn’t say how the government is ignoring the Constitution, exactly–and if you dig a little further, it all goes back to Rick Santelli’s displeasure with the stimulus plan and the budget.

To the extent that the 2009 tax protests are part of a grass-roots movement, I think it’s fine to invoke the Boston Tea Party as your inspiration–although many suspect that corporate lobbyists and Rupert Murdoch’s Fox News have a lot to do with organizing and promoting this protest, and even Santelli himself apears to have been the frontman for a rightwing foundation.  Still, if people are responding to the movement and even organizing local “tea parties” on their own, then that does accord with the local tea protests that sprang up in 1773-1774 in the wake of (and even immediately before) the Boston Tea Party of December 16, 1773.

One historical analogy that fails, however, is the idea that the Bostonians aboard the tea ships in 1773 were protesting higher taxes under the Tea Act.  This is just wrong.

• First, the British Parliament first passed the tax on tea in 1767, and Bostonians had in fact purchased plenty of tea bearing the threepenny-per-pound duty during the intervening years.  New Yorkers and Philadelphians, who smuggled almost all of their tea from Holland and elsewhere, were in fact outraged at how little the New Englanders were able to stick to their “anti-tax” principles.  In this respect, the Boston Tea Party was almost an apology.
• Second, the Tea Act would in fact have lowered the price of tea for Americans–so the idea of invoking the “Tea Party” every time you think your taxes are too high is incorrect.  Instead, the Tea Party protesters were energized by a series of principles: the government was propping up a monopoly company (the East India Company), the government was perpetuating an unjust tax (the 1767 tax on tea which had been confirmed in 1770), and the government was using the revenue from that tax to pay the salaries of judges and executive officials, thus rendering them independent of local legislatures.
• Third, and most importantly: I’ve been extremely dismayed at how many of the protesters say, “Taxation WITH representation ain’t so hot either.“  (I’m not just cherry-picking a random blog comment here–this phrase is everywhere.)

Well, no, no one LIKES paying taxes, but most people recognize that you need some form of taxation in order to pay firemen and astronauts, defend the country’s borders, try to ensure that our food isn’t poisoned, etc.  The point of protest against the Stamp Act, Townshend Acts, and Tea Act in 1765-1774 was that “taxation WITHOUT representation” would lead to slavery–in other words, the colonists believed that the British ministry was arbitrarily levying taxes on Americans when those Americans had no say in electing members of Parliament.  In a democratic republican government, if you don’t like the level of your taxes or you don’t like how your tax money is spent, you have the power to peaceably “throw the bums out.”  And you certainly have the First Amendment right to protest and rail against the stimulus and bailout.  But the point is, the people of the Revolutionary Era had to fight for those rights to get rid of a constitutional monarchy–it’s hardly the case that paying taxes from a colony to a (partially hereditary) government that you don’t elect is the same as paying taxes to a government consisting of representatives and an executive that you DO have the power to elect.

On the other hand, to the extent that the tax protesters believe that their government doesn’t adequately represent them anymore, they’re arguing something more interesting.  If we stipulate that the current execution of the United States Constitution has failed, and that reform of the Constitution is needed (which many on both the left and the right have argued), then legislation and executive policy under George W. Bush or Barack Obama (or whoever) really is the product of a flawed system, and therefore (perhaps) as unjust as anything passed by King George III and the British Parliament. Still, before making this argument, I’d recommend picking up (for instance) Edmund Morgan’s Inventing the People, on how Americans came to believe that a representative government DID have the legitimate right to make laws in a way that a king did not.

By all means, let’s have a civil debate about Obama’s policies in the midst of the economic crisis.  And by all means, if we think that the problems we’re facing are due to underlying constitutional problems rather than the current legislative/executive solutions, then let’s talk about constitutional reform.  But (although I realize it’s too late now) please don’t abuse the analogy to the Boston Tea Party, even if such abuse (again, from both the right and left) is almost as much of an American tradition as the Tea Party itself.

P.S.  Also?  Why even mention tea bags?  In 1773 they were dumping loose tea into the harbor–the tea bag wasn’t invented until later–and you can still buy loose tea.

I find it extremely interesting to note what it took, after all of these years of corporate malfeasance and incompetence going back the 90s dot-com bubble, to get the mainstream media into full 24/7 scandal mode on a business story. To get the media spouting “populist” outrage against a corporation, what was needed was for the corporation to become more than 80% publicly-owned. Even now there seems to be a tendency for the media to defer to the pretend private business executives running AIG, and save the journalistic shouting for the president and his underlings. Is bowing to private wealth and autocratic power so ingrained that only the public takeover gave the media “permission” to go after a company? Are the media just capitalist stooges ideologically trying to slough off the private sector’s depredations on to the public servants charged with the impossible task of rectifying them? Or was the mainstream political media (especially the TV and the local press/AP) just too idiotic to do anything with a complex business story until it could be reduced to the rote terms of the post- (and sub-Watergate) D.C. political scandal: what-did-the-president-know-and-when-did-he-know-it? Or there is something deeper at work here, having to do with the demonization of governmental authority that the American Revolution (as read by some guy called Bailyn) built into our republic’s DNA?

Possibly the answer is some of all of the above. It is not an original thought with me to note that the final separation of American Christianity from government around 1820 (except for certain missionary groups) seemed to do wonders for Christianity’s popular appeal and cultural power. As Lyman Beecher finally realized, New England Congregationalism’s overt association with the region’s governing elite, and its tax structure, had only weighed it down. Their churches no longer supported by government revenues, Yankee Protestants created a “Benevolent Empire” of eleemosynary institutions and voluntary societies, like the newly private colleges and many social reform associations that popped up in the 19^th century, that gained various special protections from government even as they became tremendous forces for shaping public policy.

It’s almost as if the more privatized and immune to public oversight an institution becomes in American culture the more sacrosanct it is, and, as in the AIG case, vice versa. It’s almost as if no one actually believes we have a system of self-government.

Often amid the news stories of the day, we’re tempted to ask, “don’t these people have any shame?”  Matthew Yglesias quotes Senator Chuck Grassley today: the senator almost calls on the AIG executives to commit ritual hara-kiri, and then settles on expecting the executives to merely show some contrition.  Yglesias is doubtful that this is possible, though:

We’ve somehow managed to construct something of a post-shame society, in which elites have convinced themselves that the rational agent model of human behavior is not just a useful modeling tool, but an ethical guidebook. There’s something to be said for the idea of a sense of honor and personal responsibility. …

in a healthy society, you see some consideration of issues of honor and duty and moral responsibility and certainly Americans of more humble means don’t strike me as being nearly as taken with the “greed is good” personal ethic.

He continues by reminding us that Senator Grassley is, after all, a Republican, whose party platform suggests that he should lecture people on “personal responsibility” and promote trust that unfettered, deregulated business elites always have our best interests at heart.  Perhaps instead, Yglesias suggests, Grassley could show his outrage by supporting a budget that taxes the rich more heavily and give greater benefits (tax cuts, health care) to ordinary folks.

Meanwhile, all this discussion of personal responsibility puts me in mind of a fascinating article by Joseph Bottum that I saw in First Things last year, entitled, “The Death of Protestant America: A Political Theory of the Protestant Mainline.”  Since I’m on a Tocqueville kick this week, I’ll note that Bottum quotes Tocqueville as follows:

The oddity of American religion produced the oddity of American religious ­freedom.

The greatest oddity, however, may be the fact that the United States nonetheless ended up with something very similar to the establishment of religion in the public life of the nation. The effect often proved little more than an agreement about morals: The endlessly proliferating American churches, Tocqueville concluded, “all differ in respect to the worship which is due to the Creator; but they all agree in respect to the duties which are due from man to man.” The agreement was sometimes merely an establishment of manners: “The clergy of all the different sects hold the same language,” he added. “Their opinions are in agreement with the laws, and the human mind flows onward, so to speak, in one undivided current.”

Morals and manners, however, count for a great deal in the public square, and, beyond all their differences, the diverse Protestant churches merged to give a general form and a general tone to the culture. Protestantism helped define the nation, operating as simultaneously the happy enabler and the unhappy conscience of the American republic—a single source for both national comfort and national unease.

…

Think of the American experiment as a three-legged stool, its stability found in each leg’s relation to the other legs. Democracy grants some participation in national identity, an outlet for the anxious desire of citizens to take part in history, but it always leans toward vulgarity and short-sightedness. Capitalism gives us other freedoms and outlets for ambition, but it, too, always threatens to topple over, eroding the virtues it needed for its own flourishing. Meanwhile, religion provides meaning and narrative, a channel for the hunger of human beings to reach beyond the vanities of the world, but it tilts, in turn, toward hegemony and conformity.

Through most of American history, these three legs of democracy, capitalism, and religion accommodated one another and, at the same time, pushed hard against one another.

Bottum’s thesis is that now that mainline Protestantism has faded from American public life, and Catholicism, evangelicalism, and liberal religion probably can’t reconcile sufficiently to take its place, the stability of this “three-legged stool” is under threat.  The result may be that American elites don’t have the same unifying moral compass that they did when mainline Protestantism held greater sway, with dire consequences for capitalism and democracy.  The article is very long, very well-reasoned, and very well-written—so I’m not doing it justice.  But I wonder if Bottum today is ruefully congratulating himself on his predictive powers.  Meanwhile, if you’re looking for an interesting mix of early American history, American religion, and contemporary commentary (particularly on higher education), I’ve been enjoying this blog by Professor John Fea of Messiah College.

As part of our broader common interest in geographic minutiae, my son Isaac and I like to find out where all the NCAA tournament schools (and the conferences they come from) are located. Robert Morris University was a new one for us. It seems to be the only one of the Founder-named schools to make the NCAAs, and of course it was doubly interesting to me to discover that someone had named a college after a lesser-known (to civilians) and rather disreputable character from American history. Morris was the “financier of the Revolution,” true, but he was also one of the more Madoffian figures of his day,  running his own Ponzi-like schemes in the area of land speculation (frontier real estate flipping) and ending up in debtor’s prison. The Iroquois distrusted Morris and called him the “big eater with the belly” whose appetites ran to food, wine, and their lands. Read up on the Treaty of Big Tree.

We were pleased to find that RMU has a surprisingly nice, somewhat unsugarcoated page about their namesake on the school site. Debtor’s prison was mentioned. There is even a game you can play, and Robert Morris is given his own tabloid-ready nickname, “RoMo.” Really, more Founders need to have their own games and tabloid nicknames: G-Dub, A-Ham, J-Mad, T-Jeff … the list is endless.

The school seems to be a sort of business-oriented institution, which is appropriate but perhaps not so heartening in terms of whom it would good to take as your role model today. I feel certain that RoMo would have loved credit-default swaps and tried to use them to buy Kentucky or something. “FatCats” might be a better mascot than “Colonials.”

This past weekend’s big story was that the struggling American International Group had brought over $170 billion of taxpayer bailout money in the door, while giving about $165 million in bonuses to its own executives (presumably as a reward for their masterly stewardship of the company).

The issue here is that taxpayers are supporting high bonuses for the executives of a failing company, but many observers (including Kevin Drum, now of Mother Jones and formerly of the Washington Monthly) had been criticizing the outsized compensation packages of American business executives for years.

The disparity put Ian Salisbury of the Wall Street Journal in mind of Alexis de Tocqueville.  Last month reader BPM directed my attention to this piece on whether a democracy can sustain a sharply skewed distribution of wealth.  Take a look at the chart:

As Mel Brooks used to say, it’s good to be the king.  The comparison here might have been more useful if this chart had included the wealthiest merchants, financiers, and industrialists of the 1830s United States, rather than just American civil servants.  Still, when it comes to mainstream media invoking Democracy in America to get us through our troubled times, we’ll take what we can get.

So the NYT says the Humanities are in trouble in these troubled times.  “In Tough Times, the Humanities Must Justify Their Worth,” the headline reads. Possibly, but not as much trouble as the media.

I am never sure whether history is included in media/political discussions of the Humanities, but I will bite here on one bit of justification: If most of the people running our financial and government institutions had even the slightest factual knowledge of history, especially historical trends, they would never have wrecked the economy by placing so much faith in the idea that property values would only go in one direction, up, forever. They would also have known that far from needing to get out of the way, law and government created modern private property markets in the first place and strong periodic restructuring and regulation has always been necessary to maintain them. That did not sound very humanistic, I know, but it is the kind of thing you and learn from humanities education. I will be discoursing on the Panic of 1819 later today myself, a case in point if ever there was one.

But I should perhaps let the Times speak for itself.

But in this new era of lengthening unemployment lines and shrinking university endowments, questions about the importance of the humanities in a complex and technologically demanding world have taken on new urgency. Previous economic downturns have often led to decreased enrollment in the disciplines loosely grouped under the term “humanities” — which generally include languages, literature, the arts, history, cultural studies, philosophy and religion. Many in the field worry that in this current crisis those areas will be hit hardest.

Already scholars point to troubling signs. A December survey of 200 higher education institutions by The Chronicle of Higher Education and Moody’s Investors Services found that 5 percent have imposed a total hiring freeze, and an additional 43 percent have imposed a partial freeze.

In the last three months at least two dozen colleges have canceled or postponed faculty searches in religion and philosophy, according to a job postings page on Wikihost.org. The Modern Language Association’s end-of-the-year job listings in English, literature and foreign languages dropped 21 percent for 2008-09 from the previous year, the biggest decline in 34 years.

“Although people in humanities have always lamented the state of the field, they have never felt quite as much of a panic that their field is becoming irrelevant,” said Andrew Delbanco, the director of American studies at Columbia University.

I’m sorry Andrew Delbanco feels irrelevant, but me not so much. We are not hiring right now to be sure and cutbacks are on the way, but as the Times figures indicate, the humanities seem to be falling apart at about the same rate as everything else in the world economy. At the same time, in my Midwestern public university, at any rate, our history enrollments and graduate applications are up and undergraduates seem to be looking for historical perspective more than ever, wondering how the hell we got here from there, and where else we might be going.

In short, this Times article seems to be premature, chasing after a trend that might develop but has not quite happened yet. Frankly, I put it down to the schadenfreude toward humanities academia that has long fairly pulsated through the cultural coverage of our tottering elite media institutions.