Rum, Romanism and Rebellion

And speaking of the student protest, now is the perfect time to refer all of you to Tom Jenney’s opinion piece in the Arizona Guardian, which claims, according to the title, “UA Students Protest on Your Dime.”

(Why pick on U of A students, by the way? The protest had students from all three schools. Is he worried about offending ASU alums that he has to work with?)

His claim is that he heard that a few students are getting class credit for showing up, ergo, this is subsidized political activity. Jenney must have a rather obtuse and expansive definition of the term “subsidy” if he believes that a couple of points noted with all the other work a student does in a given semester amounts to tax-payer financing.

Here is the meat of his article: that students at our three state schools are “subsidized.” Well, duh. That is the way that publicly funded colleges work. The idea is that students from Arizona are given the chance to have a college education, and that taxpayers, as a group, help out with that since it is in all of our best interests to have a well educated population. It is worth noting that tuition at many private colleges doesn’t cover the full cost either, as many of them have endowments to count on.

(By the way, has Jenney read the bit in the Arizona Constitution about college education being “as free as possible”? What he advocates would be anything but that.)

Okay, one last thing. Jenney writes:

But the relevant question is: Should students become more dependent on government over time? Or should students become less dependent on government over time?

I’m imagining a student in Jenney’s universe where they are “less dependent:”

Golly, it will take me six years to graduate because my lower division classes all got cancelled after they had to lay off the teaching assistants. Oh, and I can’t take that upper division course because my professor left for Eastern New Mexico University where he will get paid better. I wonder when they will fix the air conditioning in Gould-Simpson. Hey, I feel so less dependent. Thank you Ayn Rand!

Here is my “relevant question”: where, exactly, does Jenney’s plan for making students “less dependent” on government lead? Are he and his allies in the legislature advocating the eventual end of government support for the universities? Odd, because it is one of the few things that the writers of our state constitution mandated we spend money on. If so, then what?

NB – Checking Jenney’s bio, it seems he graduated UHS in the same class as Gabrielle Giffords. Don’t know what that means.