Every weekend has its readings.
- The University as a Warehouse for Rich People; The University as a Warehouse for Poor People.
- Austerity and Higher Education: The Case of the United Kingdom.
- The Supreme Court’s Skin-Deep Unanimity.
- Obama’s Wake-Up Call to Uganda.
- The Everyday Politics of International Intervention.
- My Imperiled City, an interview with Rebecca Solnit on San Francisco.
- (Un)Kenya.
- The College Cost-Denial Industry:
One thing Brookings and New America have in common, besides a conclusion, is a funder. Both have been recently linked to the nonprofit Lumina Foundation, which was founded on $770 million from the sale of student lender USA Group to Sallie Mae in 2000. Lumina, Buzzfeed reports, has given Delisle’s New American Foundation nearly $3 million since 2008. Salon reported earlier this month that Chingos has received $500,000 from Lumina, $300,000 of it granted to him and Akers during the past year. Brookings received more than $1 million from Lumina in 2013 alone. Despite all the coverage for both the Brookings and New America papers, other reporters haven’t bothered to dig into these relationships and ask why a foundation that emerged from Sallie Mae stock options is so interested — now more than $1 billion interested — in making the rapidly expanding student debt crisis look sustainable.
It’s not hard to figure out why lenders want borrowers and policymakers not to panic. When the Obama administration nationalized 85 percent of higher education lending in 2010, executives like the ones who now sit on the Lumina Foundation board were the big losers. Since then, college costs have continued skyrocketing, but the tens of billions in profits have gone to the Department of Education instead of private lenders. If you were them, and you were angling to get back in the game, the first step would be to edge the government out, either by getting the feds to withdraw or by keeping costs rising faster and higher than DoE loan limits. Graduate loans are a great place to start in a divide-and-conquer strategy, so it’s no surprise that Delisle concludes in favor of shrinking the government’s role. Nor is it surprising that Akers and Chingos can’t find a cost crisis, even though theirs is a fringe minority opinion among higher education analysts and investors.
- Proust in Somalia.
- The Bureaucracy of Us, on same-sex relationships under the law.
- What Happens to DC’s Homeless When They Die?
- Trigger for What?
- Pablo Escobar’s Hippos.
- Why are Rwandans Disappearing?
- Sight Lines.
- Abortion vs. Speech.
- McCullen: A View from a Thousand Feet:
[T]here is nothing theoretical about abortion for one in three women and many trans men and gender queer people. Abortion isn’t a symbol. It isn’t an idea. It’s a medical procedure they chose to undergo. And the sidewalk outside the clinic isn’t a metaphor for the American abortion debate or the polarization of public opinion, but an actual sidewalk through which their actual bodies must cross in the face of actual harassment. To treat it as an abstraction is disrespectful to those who know too well the very real impacts of impeded access — and also betrays the Court’s distance from the on-the-ground dangers it now exacerbates. In McCullen we see the Justices looking down on the sidewalks of America’s clinics from a thousand feet. From this great height, every walk through the crowds looks shorter and every death threat sounds softer. It must feel very safe up there.
Scott Ross 