> Alan Rudy
>
> Yes, it is higher but you by refusing to interrogate that fact are
> supporting the Mackinaw Center's and Freep's reactive position.
>
> ^^^^
> CB: I ain't refusing to interrogate anything; or supporting the
> Mackinaw Center's position. My position is raise taxes on the rich and
> corporations , cut the military budget , moratorium on state and local
> bond payments to Wall Street, and that the federal government should
> bailout the states like it bailed out Wallstreet. The Mackinaw Center
> would hate that.
>
>
Yes, you have and yes you are (though with a twist that actually undermines
your position).
You refuse to unpack, or accept any of my unpacking (or the unpacking provided by someone to both of us off list), of the Mackinaw Center's and Freep's "fact" that compensation for administrators - and faculty in some instances - has gone up during the recently intensified downturn and that this is a problem worthy of criticism.
At no point have you responded to any of the substantive and extensively researched arguments I've made rooted in the history of neocon/neolib education policy and the ways in which it has both encouraged and forced the expansion of administrative staffing and paying professional administrators higher salaries than traditional academics promoted from within. At no point have you responded to the thirty-years-of-fiscal-crisis- used-to-discipline-and-restructure/privatize-public-education argument. At no point did you respond to the increasing-demands-for-externally- funded-research-causes-fiscal-and-pedagogical-deficits-while-forcing- more-administrative-oversight-and-infrastructural-costs argument. Claims like the unsupported one above - particularly one's like the one above which operates at the wrong level of abstraction AND skirts the real issues at hand (are you going to address the roots of the "problem" so as to understand it or are you going to treat the "fact" as if it has no roots and can therefore be legitimately used to back a reactive politics, whether left or right - don't add anything to genuine debate.
Last, what your actual desired policy program is has no bearing on your insistence that the MC/F are pointing to a real problem... unless your solution intends to do nothing about the "fact"/"problem" at which point you'd need to say so but then that could undermine your argument that the "fact"/"problem" is actually a problem. At that point you'd, perhaps, also be inclined to see that maybe my arguments against posting stuff from the Mackinaw Center printed in the Freep, and then insisting that they've got their finger on something real enough to be worth taking seriously are legit (esp. since I never said that EVERYTHING printed in the Freep is crap, all I said was that THIS was... and that there's good reason to be suspicious of that paper anyway).