My HSU degree was free.
Financial aid and work-study paid for my tuition, books and supplies. That was 1978, back when the promise of access to education under the U.S. Education Act of 1965 was still being honored.]
What followed was the Reagan-era of public divestment, privatization and deregulation, “a failed economic ideology” according to Alan Greenspan during his testimony before Congress in 2008. (Greenspan headed the U.S. Federal Reserve under four U.S. presidents).
Thus, the 1980’s saw rapid tuition increases and financial-aid cuts, chronic enrollment declines and budget reductions ensued, worsened by university administrator’s successful campaign against Affirmative Action, reducing minority admissions statewide.
In response, HSU focused upon the sensibilities of America’s middle and upper-income families, in essence, competing to attract wealthier students. Ironically, this is the same strategy of the nation’s largest banks, home builders, automakers and hospitals; to increase profits by financing, manufacturing and prescribing bigger, inefficient homes, cars, and medical procedures that target middle and upper-income consumers.
America’s working-class families are now bailing-out the industries that neglected them, subsidizing “public” universities that exclude them, and are bankrupted by hospitals overcharging for poorer outcomes.
Manufacturing products for a narrow class of consumer boosted short-term corporate profits, just as expanded leisure facilities successfully boosted HSU’s enrollment, a no-brainer for university executives who send their kids to Hawaii State.
For HSU to compete, it outsourced tens of millions of dollars to turn Center Arts, Center Activities, and the Student Recreation Center into an empire of fun with a plethora of subsidiary programs, remodeled venues and executive offices, growing a private bureaucracy of coordinators, directors, accountants, controller, and six-figure salaries.
How does an environment with advanced degrees in economics, finance, statistics, and social science, fail to perform a single-efficiency study, or a cost-benefit analysis, prior to outsourcing public services? Why continue subscribing to a broadly failed, republican “trickle-down” ideology from the 1980s? To find out, I reviewed the voter registrations of HSU’s top 25 executives in 1991. All but two were registered republican! This proves the effectiveness of the “Other Affirmative Action,” unreported by media.
Outsourcing is one of HSU’s dirty little secrets. Research by America’s leading expert on civil service, New York University Professor Paul Light, reveals that outsourcing public services to private contracts diminishes institutional memory which creates the leverage that private contractors use for higher compensation and expanded bureaucracies.
Top officials in the Obama administration are acknowledging that private contracting is actually more expensive than civil servants, and far less accountable. The U.S. Office of Management and Budget is planning to release a study with “tough new guidelines” this September 2009.
Consider this: an HSU graduate, who purchased only one rafting trip in five years for $50, actually paid about $1,050 for the privilege, when you include the mandatory “Student Body Center Fee” for each semester. This is a class-centered system that predominately benefits those who can afford to consume the most entertainment. Sailboats, windsurfing, holiday excursions to ski in Bend, Oreg. and raft the Klamath, new rock-climbing walls, spending tens of thousands of dollars for one-hour appearances by Bill Cosby, a library Internet Café, an over-engineered, underutilized boathouse/conference center in Eureka; none of these are “essential services” as mandated by the California Education Code, Section 89000, governing outsourcing to “auxiliary organizations”.
To most of us, “essential” still means that public programs benefit everyone equally and are necessary for basic campus operations.
Wasting millions in public treasure, merely to exploit every profitable entertainment potential, is anathema to the fundamental academic challenge to motivate, teach, and learn a deeper appreciation for the intrinsic value of nature, art, literature, music, science, and information.
Today, every measurable economic and biological indicator continues to decline in an unsustainable world of depleting energy, natural resources, and biological diversity. For our species to survive, we must rapidly extricate ourselves from a reckless addiction to consumerism. If living amid California’s only Pacific Northwest rainforests, miles of beaches, mountains and six pristine rivers offers “inadequate entertainment,” then we are doomed!
Student walkouts and taxpayer boycotts can motivate HSU to follow President Obama’s leadership in reversing the failures of outsourcing. Well-educated HSU graduates can start their own businesses in outdoor adventures and performance theaters. Employees of HSU’s bookstore, housing and dining services can become civil servants, ending their erroneous classification as “at-will” employees. It will free facilities for desperately needed research in alternative degrees. A “Center for Social Activism” could be tailored to apply to every discipline to teach students how to improve careers they enjoy more than the highest profits their careers can generate.
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