A few months ago tred unsuccessfully to convince some of my former colleagues at Illinois State U (from which I retired) that their problems were rather more deeply rooted than an asshole of a president and a bunch of assholes on the board of regents. As I thought over the situation, something similar to Wojtek's analysis struck me as possible.
Does the ruling class for the most part rule passively. That is they can trust their various lackeys (politicians, managers, cops, judges) to spontaneously act as assholes, and the ruling class merely as it were sets limits--e.g., not too much police brutality, not too much economic repression of the faculty at 2d line state universities. The Illinois legislature has never ceased wishing to swat those profs, but for a decade or two (1960-1973 or so) the legislature got somehow restrained and ISU grew rather freely in different ways. Then increasingly the reactionary forces in the legislature (that, I repeat, had always dominated it, even in "liberal" periods) were increasingly "unleashed."
This is mere speculation, and not too precisely articulated, but it roughly fits the empirical actuality here in central Illinois over the last 37 years.
The faculty has cooperated all along with their slow execution. ISU for many years had a sort of tacit "remedial" program, which consisted of "lax" rules governing dropping and repeating of courses. A student could drop a course as often as he/she chose; a student could also re-take a course he or she had flunked or got a D in as often as she wished, and only the last grade counted. It was therefore possible, for a student who came unprepared to college from the inner city or from one of the many little semi-rural high schools around the state to pick up a bunch of Ds or Fs the freshman year, but recover completely in a couple semesters by retaing those courses. I knew a number of students who "got through" this way -- i.e., they picked up the h.s. education they'd missed by taking and flunking courses (a little stuck) until finally they could get a grip on the material, and that would simply wipe the earlier courses from the record.
The drive for "standards" started in the late 70s, and this system was the first to go. All the idiots on the faculty were either indifferent to or positively enthusiastic about this cutting of possible alliances with the black community.
Carrol