Where Education Is ‘Sold to the Highest Bidder’
by Alexander Reed Kelly
by Alexander Reed Kelly
The attack on the spirit of higher education is exemplified in the installation of former Indiana Gov. Mitch Daniels, a neoliberal archfiend of public schooling, as president of Purdue University.
Daniels is the Republican sweetheart who made waves two weeks ago when The Associated Press reported that in 2010 he directed his staff to make sure no Indiana schools were teaching the work of American historian and critic Howard Zinn. Daniels called Zinn “anti-American” and his “People’s History of the United States”—a book beloved by the left for its unflinching look at two centuries of political brutality—“a truly execrable, anti-factual piece of disinformation that misstates American history.”
Writing in Jacobin magazine, two brave Purdue University professors, Tithi Bhattacharya and Bill V. Mullen, describe their president as “part of a national project to dismantle the already-shrinking public sector and subject the lives of working people to the vagaries of the market. His first legislative initiative after taking office as governor was to strip public sector employees—including teachers—of collective bargaining rights. As governor, Daniels cut 150 million from higher education, created the largest voucher scheme for public education in the country, and ended his term by forcing through right-to-work legislation in Indiana. In all of these endeavors, Daniels was a trailblazer for more notorious Republicans like Wisconsin’s Scott Walker and proponents of SB5 legislation in Ohio.”
Daniels, Bhattacharya and Mullen tell us, is part of a nationwide drive to privatize national