By Zach Foster
This article expands on an idea presented in Students Fight Back, Swinging Blindly
“Students should have a say in running our schools.”
This claim is actually grounded in legitimacy. The true purpose of a student union and its student body organizations is not to waste time in trivial distractions like planning school dances and sports rallies, but rather to make the concerns, grievances, and suggestions of students known to the faculty, administration, and governing school board. If the boards of governors of colleges and universities and/or the elected school boards of public schools are ignoring their student unions, then they do a grievous disservice to their main consumers: the students—the reason for their employment. In this case it is appropriate for the students to organize under the leadership of well-informed cool heads and explore methods of civil disobedience until their rights are honored and they are given a voice that is heard.
However, students must never forget that they are not businessmen. What many people forget is, though the purpose of all schools public and private is to educate and award degrees to those who have earned them, schools are businesses[1][2] and if they are not run for profit, they must at least earn back their operating cost. Many students want to implement “free this” and “free that” for everyone while having little understanding of the costs, the benefits, and more importantly the consequences. There is a reason why schools are run by elected boards.
Here, however, is where schools run into another problem. Often times, the majority of board members come not from the private sector, where they would attain experience in running money making operations and knowing quality control, but from within academia.[3] These are people who went to college after high school and never left. They got their Bachelors Degree, stayed around to complete graduate school and maybe even entered the PhD program, and then became professors. They have never dealt with the market and probably couldn’t even turn a profit at a lemonade stand. Even professors of Economics have only theoretical experience, unless they have actually entered the private sector at some point in their lives, which few have. This begs one question: who really has better qualifications for being on a school’s (a business’) governing board? A small business owner or department store manager who knows how to keep a business afloat and profitable, meeting the needs of consumers, or a professor whose knowledge of money comes in the form of a book or two on mere theory? The answer is quite obvious.
Incompetent fools like these, as well as inexperienced students who think they can do a better job, are the ones causing the problems that make schools operate in the red and end up having to raise tuition and cut programs. People like them are described even better in Ludwig Von Mises’ piece “The Anti-Capitalist Bias of American Intellectuals”[4] than they are in this piece. These know-nothings who sit on boards and have no market experience are ill-qualified to run schools and are poor stewards of the American tax payer’s dollar. More often than not, the board members’ only grasp of economic theory comes from Chapter 1 of Das Kapital.
These board members cry for more government money and grants, rather than finding innovative ways for the school, the college, or the university to make some of its own money. This kind of people contributes little to societal development of improvement. They are neither innovators nor entrepreneurs; they are merely an extension of government bureacracy. Next time elections include candidates for a school board, voters should perhaps pay close attention to them and not just the clowns running for higher office.
[1] Texas Governor Treats Colleges like Businesses. http://chronicle.com/article/Texas-Governor-Thinks-of/124603/
[2] “Like a Business.” http://www.washingtonmonthly.com/college_guide/blog/like_a_business.php
[3] Minimum Qualifications for Faculty and Administrators in California Community Colleges. P. 26-27. http://www.portervillecollege.edu/human-resources/docs/Min-qual-CCCCO-2006.pdf
[4] Von Mises, Ludwig. The Anti-Capitalistic Mentality. Chapter 1. Mises Institute.
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