[EatingWithForks]

I don't know if grievance studies is a cause of tuition bloat. Most of the departments I know to be labeled as grievance studies were founded well before tuition increased, so it makes not much sense to attribute them to increased tuition. The increase in tuition hews much more closely with the decrease in government funding to these institutions, which requires more tuition from students, which means students desires must be catered to... so increased lifestyle luxuries makes sense there...

[whatshisface]

It might be naive but I imagine training students to make improvements to weapons systems increases government support of universities and training students to criticize the government decreases it.

[EatingWithForks]

Like I said, the founding of such studies predates the increases in tuition. Trying to argue that specific academic studies causes tuition increases by making students mistrustful of government, but only several decades later, needs a lot of evidence for that kind of claim. There are far more direct, closely related situations, like the federal and state governments decreasing funding or the inverted proportion of funds coming from govt/grants vs student-paid tuition via the loan system.

[whatshisface]

>Trying to argue that specific academic studies causes tuition increases by making students mistrustful of government, but only several decades later, needs a lot of evidence for that kind of claim.

Right-leaning politicians are citing "grievance studies" as their reason for not liking universities, so the only stretch in this hypothesis is to think it might have been happening for decades before bubbling to the surface. It's not that it makes students distrustful of the government, it's that it makes politicians ask, "why are we paying them if they're going to make our goals harder to achieve?" I would not be surprised if the protests against the Vietnam war turned the inner view that many held about university faculty, but few expressed it because of the esteem the public held them in at the time.

[UncleMeat]

This is a totally different claim than what was obviously meant by the first post.

"We are wasting money on these fields" and "these fields piss off reactionaries so they cut our budgets, despite being a tiny portion of the overall budget and not hiring new lines in years" are just totally different.

[whatshisface]

Whose first post do you mean? My two posts mean the same thing, doing what legislators want would tend to increase funding and doing what they don't like would do the opposite. I guess you could read my first post as being about wasting money if you think criticizing the government is not useful... I guess there are some countries like Singapore out there where that is the case.

[fallingknife]

Maybe not the departments directly, but the nonsense they push certainly does. e.g. University of Michigan has 163 full time DEI employees.

[Clubber]

When I went to college in the 90s, the gave us a breakdown of tuition costs. Half the cost was crap the student government wanted.

[BeetleB]

That's because tuition was cheap in the 90's.

[wolverine876]

Also, the history and English departments don't have big budgets to start with.

[Georgelemental]

Were they the same size upon founding as they are now? A few activists get their foot in the door, push to hire friendly administrators, who push for more activists, who push for more administrators… Eventually everything is taken over

[cycomanic]

In what world do academics have power over which administrators can be hired? If you really think that some professor in CRT could take over a department, then you just show that you don't have a clue.

[Georgelemental]

> In what world

The world I see around me with my eyes, and more specifically the public university I currently attend.