I have remarked over the past week in multiple columns — there has been so much to say — that while the federal government is the main reason college football is imperiled (and done for the fall at the Pac-12 and in the other conferences which have opted out of the fall season), school presidents own a significant chunk of the blame.
School presidents have plainly been unsuccessful in convincing their representatives and Senators in Congress to pass robust spending packages. How much of an effort did they even make? Aren’t these people supposed to be the expert schmoozers, the people who can lean on other influential figures and get them to deliver important resources in crucial moments? If they did try, they didn’t try very successfully.
Universities and their communities needed actual resources if the coronavirus was going to get subdued to the extent necessary to facilitate college football. We can plainly see the government didn’t even come close. School presidents obviously weren’t responsible for passing actual bills, but they didn’t have any effect on Congress, which represents political weakness and impotence.
That was — and is — a primary failure of university presidents in this pandemic.
The other especially big failure by school presidents: Not reducing tuition for students, even with on-campus instruction being reduced or eliminated in the pandemic. We noted this point at Harvard earlier in the year, while making the larger point that a number of schools (not just Ivy League universities, either) were trying to squeeze profits out of students despite not being able to offer a typically full menu of services and opportunities to students.
Now we have to make note of this same basic point at home — at USC.
President Carol Folt is not serving students in a pandemic. She is serving the profit engine and plainly contradicting her own words.
Kudos to editorialist Stuart Carson and the student journalists at the Daily Trojan. Carson rightly excoriated Carol Folt in a scathing column on Wednesday. You should read it. I won’t repeat Mr. Carson’s arguments because you need to appreciate them in their original context. They are sharply articulated.
OPINION: The University leadership once again demonstrated their apathy for the student body by maintaining the 3.5% tuition hike amid a global pandemic and an online semester. https://t.co/jsB8QfCcVy
— Daily Trojan (@dailytrojan) August 14, 2020
I will only excerpt this part of the column, a direct quote from President Folt herself:
“Above all, we want to make sure that all our students continue to dream big and act boldly,” Folt said. “You are needed more than ever […] and we’re going to work with you to make your USC experience rewarding and successful in the face of so much uncertainty.”
What a crock of shit.
You want students to be liberated and dream big, but you’re going to insist on maintaining a tuition hike a pandemic? Get lost.
This is the completely out-of-touch mindset which has pervasively infected the leadership class of the country. Congress has dithered — and failed to get a second round of stimulus checks and fresh waves of unemployment assistance sent to citizens — while tens of millions of Americans are living on the edge.
A 3.5-percent tuition hike, compared to Congress’s neglect, might not seem like the most monstrous act one could possibly imagine. However, the root reality of insensitivity to the financial struggles of other people, and specifically the burdens young people are facing at a time when their economic futures look very grim, is manifested in USC’s willingness to maintain a tuition increase in a pandemic.
How utterly greedy. How entirely indifferent to the struggles of young people and their parents.
If this is the best the leadership class has to offer, keeping in mind that USC’s previous president drowned in scandal himself, it’s no wonder we’re in such a mess as a country.
USC also needs to find a president who actually cares about people other than the elites. USC is — in a real sense — a microcosm of what is happening in Washington, D.C., and in the boardrooms of top corporations.
More money for us, say the leaders of large American institutions, even if it means pinching ordinary people in a pandemic.
Carol Folt represents the rot at the heart of our leadership class.