Educational Prostitution: Purchasing Policy

Good morning ATS'rs!

Seems that what you learn, more and more, is dependent upon where you attend school. And, increasingly, on the funding sources that your educational institution depends on.
The article (link below) describes a growing trend among rich conservatives to use their economic clout to inject their socio-political leanings into educational institutions.
This is counter-intuitive to the point of lunacy. What's next, McDonald's college? Disney University? Where you learn how and what to buy, and when! And of course, how to think and how NOT to think.
Heaven forbid America should attempt to truly free the minds of its people, because if that were to happen the chains placed upon her people will be sorely obvious to all. If the puppet show is revealed for what it is, a huge ponzi scheme, people who could intellectually understand the scam and act against it would likely do so.
So why not shape their opinions by cheating them out of a truly free education? Teach this, get money. Teach this other thing we don't like, and, well.....

Conservative activists have a good-cop, bad-cop approach to the university. In either case, the same right-wing foundations pay the bill. This is the way the conservative movement works across the board: a collaboration between country club manners and the issuing of position papers on the one hand, and frothing-at-the-mouth questioning of the president’s birth certificate and allegations of communist infiltration on the other.

The Bradley Foundation is the largest funder of Middle East Forum, which runs the "traitor"-denouncing Campus Watch. They also fund the more upright American Council of Trustees and Alumni, founded by Lynne Cheney and Joseph Lieberman (who has since distanced himself) to promote the Western canon and bash leftist professors. Two months after 9/11, they issued a report titled "Defending Civilization: How Our Universities Are Failing America and What Can Be Done About It." Bradley has also given millions to the Cato Institute and Heritage Foundation, and has bankrolled pro-charter and voucher organizations nationwide seeking to privatize American public schools.

And I add this last part because it has a quote from a prof from my Uni (Go Marauders!).

The campaign to privatize and corporatize American education is a top-to-bottom effort. The casualization of academic labor gains inspiration from the ongoing and often successful movement to privatize secondary education; the watchwords in both cases being “end tenure.” As a recent New York Times article disclosed, the Gates Foundation has funded thinkers inside and outside of academia, including $3.5 million to Harvard to “place ‘strategic data fellows’ who could act as ‘entrepreneurial change agents’ in school districts in Boston, Los Angeles and elsewhere." The campaign to bring Atlas Shrugged to colleges mirrors a vast effort in American high schools, to which the Ayn Rand Institute has distributed hundreds of thousands of free copies. “The degree to which public education fell so easily gives the Right more confidence to go after higher education,” says Henry Giroux, professor of English and Cultural Studies at McMaster University.

Ayn Rand U? Alternet Article

ALSO! Check this vid out. Says what I feel and think!



Sickening. Like I said, intellectual prostitution at its worst.
DD