Propaganda at work

Have you seen the propaganda floating around campus lately? And no, not just the latest photos of Tom Crean and Hoosier basketball — that’s propaganda we can be proud of.

The two newest buildings on campus, the updated Kelley School of Business and the new extension of the Jacobs School of Music on Third Street, are covered in tarps with the slogan “Philanthropy at Work” printed on the front.

That’s the message the University has been forcing on us for quite some time now. And while those buildings may indeed be funded by philanthropy, in-state tuition has increased a whopping 51 percent in the last six years, from $2,895 to $4,375 per semester,  and housing prices in Bloomington are among the highest in the state.

Students are paying more to receive a public education than ever before. And who is benefiting from all of this privatization? The most obvious answer is the taxpayers, who now fund only 18 percent of IU’s budget compared to 50 percent just 20 years ago.

On the flip side of that equation, students now pay 51 percent of the costs to run the University.

By 2020, IU President Michael McRobbie estimates only 10 percent of IU’s budget will come from the state.

To combat the funding shortage, he continues to propose bringing in private businesses to operate University functions.

But that hasn’t made, nor will it ever make, enough of an impact to cover the funding gap at IU. Nearly 50 percent of current IU undergraduates will walk out the door with student debt — the average alum from 2011 owing $22,256.

Instead of the state passing on that debt to the taxpayers, especially to the wealthiest of Hoosiers, who themselves likely benefited from cheap and incentivized education, a generation of us are now graduating so deeply in debt that the economic freedom previous generations had upon graduating from college is unthinkable.

The reality is that too many of us will spend the beginning of our post-graduation lives paying off debts to the same financial institutions that helped wreck our economy six years ago, rather than starting businesses, buying homes or investing in new technologies. The amount of graduates who can’t pay back their student loans just spiked, and the student loan bubble is starting to burst, according to Zero Hedge.

That means loans will likely be harder to come by soon, eliminating more and more Hoosiers from the chance at a quality education. And since this isn’t a consequence anyone finds acceptable, notably President McRobbie himself, why isn’t more being done to fight it?

The answer is that we students, faculty and staff are the only ones with the incentive to bring back the public funding of public education.

We’d be fools to count on the University administration to engage this issue seriously. They’ll never admit to what this crisis really is — a direct assault by the state on public education.

It has been spearheaded by Gov. Mitch Daniels, who’s been on a mission to destabilize public education as best he can during his two terms in office.

Private businesses then take over their functions, do all they can to turn a profit, and in return, support the candidacies of the sympathetic policymakers who gave them new business.

Just look at Daniels’ appointment to Purdue University’s presidency, which was voted on by a business-minded Board of Trustees he himself appointed, to see our lawmakers’ true incentive behind privatization.

In case you haven’t heard, there’s a campus-wide strike being proposed at IU this spring during the April Board of Trustees meeting.

I urge you to research the issue of student debt further and find out who’s benefiting from this crisis.

Let the owners of our University know that you are finished being a victim.

­— tydthomp@indiana.edu