> Good point. Yes academia is pretty powerless and attacking them is a
> way of burnishing your populist credentials.
Powerless? The schools have a lot of power over kids' lives, and the bigger and more elite schools have a lot of political and economic power too.
Columbia University, my very bad neighbor here in NYC, is able to manipulate the eminent-domain process in order to grab land for its unending metastases. I'm told that NYU downtown wields an equally heavy hand in its neighborhood.
And I well remember the days when Columbia was buying up apartment buildings and clearing out the tenants in order to repurpose the buildings. They could do this because they had an exception written into the tenant-protection laws for their own benefit.
Any community where there's a big university is very much a company town, with all that that implies.
-- --
Michael J. Smith mjs at smithbowen.net
http://stopmebeforeivoteagain.org http://www.cars-suck.org http://fakesprogress.blogspot.com
Any proposition that seems self-evident is almost certainly false.