Why America is Becoming a Second-World Nation and California is in the Crosshairs

[courtesy of California Progress Report]

Part 2 of a 4 Part Series

By Marilyn Dudley-Flores, Ph.D
CEO
OPS-Alaska

Sweatshop Universities – America for Dummies

President Richard Nixon’s Administration ended the Apollo program that made the United States a space-capable society and one respected for its science and technology. But, the Nixon Administration ended more than a space program. Ramping up to human Mars exploration would have laid the groundwork for “big science, great policy” answers to not only issues of long-duration space exploration, but also to alternative energy sources, epochal climate change offset, and disaster mitigation.

It was not to be. The decisions of the Nixon Administration “dumbed down” American postsecondary education as a consequence of the lapse of the Apollo program and the follow-on science and technology events that did not happen in the 1980s and 1990s. The Apollo Era had stimulated knowledge production and technological advancement because the federal government poured money into colleges and universities to grease the engines of prestige on the America-to-the-Moon front during the Cold War.

Over the course of time, the American postsecondary student body swelled owing to new demographic realities and changes in the economic profile of the United States that were in part owing to the changes wrought by Apollo Era technological advancements and forward thinking. An increasing number of women and minorities gained access to colleges and universities, as well as those who might otherwise have pursued careers in manufacturing. As a result, when Apollo-driven federal money (and oversight) disappeared from Academe, the impact on colleges and universities was greater than if America had never gone to the Moon.

Postsecondary administrators free-reined a new kind of governance called the “corporate model” to manage the loss. In the absence of federal funds, academic administrators increasingly raised student tuitions and invented creative ways to teach whole new armies of students with professors on starvation wages. We in California are intimately familiar with that model, for our California State University system, that Halliburton of Academe, is the poster child of it.