Inequality and degraded public universities are mutually reinforcing

Evidence

Growing and increasingly legitimate socioeconomic inequalities and abandonment of the project of educating a public for citizenship are at once cause and effect of public divestment from universities and public universities’ departure from a mission of providing broad liberal arts education to the many. Put the other way around, curtailed access to public universities, along with their changing mission and content, reflects and intensifies contemporary dedemocratizing tendencies in Euro-Atlantic nation-states generally and the United States in particular. — Wendy Brown, Undoing the Demos, 366

Categorization

• QUESTION: Claims mutual causation (reflexive circuit) between divestment and dedemocratization — worth probing whether any empirical studies distinguish the two directions.
• XREF: Mirrors the ‘circularity’ argument in the Milgrom reputation literature and adds to the ADDENDUM on trees-as-infrastructure? No — rather connects to Bourdieu’s cultural-reproduction thesis. — connects to: Stigler blamed egalitarian public funding of universities for declining research quality — Dieter Plehwe, Quinn Slobodian & Philip Mirowski (eds.), Nine Lives of Neoliberalism, 121; Racial inequality is structurally embedded in the public-private university funding divide; Neoliberal university governance subordinates academic freedom to institutional transactions — Wendy Brown, Undoing the Demos: Neoliberalism’s…, 663 (+2 more)
• DEEPTHINKING: A genuinely theoretical claim — a feedback circuit where cause and effect cannot be cleanly separated — that resists one-sentence summary.

Broader Connections

• Racial inequality is structurally embedded in the public-private university funding divide #expands (0.85)
• Economists drove and profited from the commercialization of universities #expands (0.78) — Philip Mirowski, Never Let a Serious Crisis Go to Waste, 587
• Neoliberal university governance subordinates academic freedom to institutional transactions #expands (0.75) — Wendy Brown, Undoing the Demos, 663
• Immediacy theory compounds academic deskilling caused by plutocratic destruction of education #corroborates (0.72) — Anna Kornbluh, Immediacy, or The Style of Too Late…, 251