Tag: Higher education

Full professor William Penn of MSU has made his judgment about Republicans. He has labeled them racist, rapists, userers and, come to think of it, he isn't too impressed with their complexions either. To the degree that they are human at all, GOPers have become neo-zombies having sucked their ill begotten wealth from its planet victim.

It is an odd judgment coming from someone who can put in a 15 hour work week huddled warmly amongst like minded (and like challenged) peers pulling down $150,000 a year while also collecting some of the best employment benefits known to modern man.

But if I took two things away from the speech, the second would be that the Gov's fancy new programs each have disaster written all over them.  Now, a day or two after delivering the critically panned performance she's back to the drawing board offering even more suggestions the people of Michigan would be better off ignoring.

Lets start, though, with the originals and head over to the Ivory Tower which investigates the woman's populist assertion that universities should freeze tuition, lest they incur her unending wrath.  Turns out, those kinds of threats really won't do much to help the relatively few Michigan students sticking around after high school.

...Beware, say national experts and Michigan university officials. Granholm's plan is certain to trigger resistance from the universities, and it's not clear how much it would really save students.

A short-term freeze, they also note, would not address long-term problems such as rising health care costs that fuel the rising cost of a degree.

"The reality is that tuition freezes are not permanent," said Sandy Baum, a senior economist with the College Board, a national group that manages standardized testing and analyzes issues related to higher education. "If tuition is frozen one year, you're going to have to make up for it two or three years later."

In other words, the woman is passing the buck.  If you sit down and think about it for a moment, it's a masterful move and makes perfect sense based on her track record.  The woman has made a career, literally, out of criticizing John Engler and moves that created the top economy in the United States for much of the 1990s.  Somehow every problem she encountered for the first six years in office were THAT man's fault, not hers.

It was always HIS administration.  HIS policies.  HIS legacy.  She was just fighting upstream and incapable of overcoming what he'd done.  Never mind the tacit admission that one Governor, Engler, was somehow powerful and able enough to create policy that altered the state of the economy for decades while another, Granholm herself, remains entirely devoid of any skill, power or ability to do so much as dent her predecessor's momentum... that's beside the point and far too nuanced for the random political observer.  It was HIS fault.  That's all that matters.

Now, with fewer than two years left before riding off into that Hollywood / Lobbyist sunset that so clearly calls to her, she's attempting to plant legislative landmines that will only be tripped after she leaves office.  Try to make things a little less ugly while she's stuck with us and then wait for the next guy to blow himself up on her hidden time bombs.  HIS fault, not hers.

Read on...