“Watching our country dismantle its educational systems in the name of cost savings is akin to a family drowning its children to save on the grocery bill.”
Amy Hagopian
Dear Colleagues,
In my work in Global Health over the past few years, I have had opportunity to travel to many health facilities and health professional training schools around the world. It is clear that one of America’s most important (and maybe ONLY) comparative advantage internationally is our education system, especially higher ed. (The one rival might be our cultural entertainment empire…) It’s the one thing we have to offer the world that is significant and outstanding for its quality and its generosity.
Watching our country dismantle its educational systems in the name of cost savings is akin to a family drowning its children to save on the grocery bill. It causes me great sorrow to watch our colleges and universities come apart…from Wisconsin to California to Ohio, Arizona, Texas and here at home. Our great institutions seem to have no friends in Congress or state legislatures who are willing to defend our nation’s real public treasures. In the assault on our schools, the only thing worse than Democrats is the Republicans. They are literally taking our children out in the water and holding them down until they stop struggling and the bubbles quit bursting the surface.
I write this while on the plane coming home from Haiti, which is trying to cobble together a semblance of public health training at the masters degree level. I visited university campuses and talked with faculty who are trying to make this happen against great odds–they’re operating classrooms in tents that stand in the rubble of their fallen buildings even a year after the “tremble-terre.” But they KNOW their only hope for the future lies in the education of their young and creating professionals through higher education.
As our universities stand in the rubble of the economic collapse of 2008, while the criminal banksters and their friends in government still walk around loose, I wonder what is our hope for the future. I don’t know that I’ve ever felt this hopeless about the future of our country. Isn’t anyone going to wade out and reclaim our kids from this disaster?
Amy Hagopian, PhD