Flutterby™! : On Afghanistan and Higher Education Funding

I was reading the latest missive from Fucking Inappropriate, Somewhere in Afghanistan; 29.SEPT.12, and thinking that if we just, for on week, skipped the foreign affairs section of the newspaper and read writing from people who were actually there, what we demanded of our politicians would be so different.

Then slightly later that day, I made some comment about administrative costs and the cost of college, and was schooled:

• A new report suggests that while growing personnel and construction costs are a factor in the rising price of public higher education, a decline in state funding is the real culprit.
• The Pillaging of America's State Universities

both of which (and many more), make very strong cases that state universities are costing more because we're funding them less. But, I asked myself, how could that be? I mean the New York Times says that the cost is due to administrative overhead:

Even more strikingly, an analysis by a professor at California Polytechnic University, Pomona, found that, while the total number of full-time faculty members in the C.S.U. system grew from 11,614 to 12,019 between 1975 and 2008, the total number of administrators grew from 3,800 to 12,183 — a 221 percent increase.

And then I started reading the article more carefully. Seeing what it wasn't saying, things like:

• How are state and federal dollars increasing relative to attendance?
• Per a conversation with another friend in education, are those "administrators" really low-level administrative assistances, other reclassified work, or possibly really ways to provide additional jobs to students?

And I realized: Oh, wait: The New York Times. Of the infamous lifestyle articles that are so fun to mock. The paper that parroted unchallenged the propaganda that threw us into the Iraq war. The paper that real journalists decided to not include in The Panama Papers release. Of course they're just republishing some think tank lobbying organizations' agenda.

And then I made the connection between that style of news and what we get for foreign policy reporting. And I realized that while the NYT may be a good example of pretty egregious, it's a continuum.

I don't know how to fix media, but I suspect we can start by, just a few times a week, reading the thoughts of people on the ground and skipping the articles that are poorly rewritten press releases of some think tank with an agenda.