An Educated Citizenry Benefits Everyone
For those who look back at our founding generation with admiration, because they defeated the most powerful military on the planet to establish an innovative and progressive form of government, designed to support our individual liberty in ways that would boost our general welfare.  I am one of those who believes we should take great pride in our Constitution and the federalist system it created.

Our founding generation placed great value on the importance of a government strong enough to protect private property, structured to check ambition with ambition, and based on the proposition that individual liberty and collective prosperity are only connected when we structure society to support and encourage and protect the vigorous contestation of ideas that JS Mill puts at the core of creating and preserving freedom in his classic essay On Liberty.

Benjamin Franklin said that "The good education of youth has been esteemed by wise men in all ages, as the surest foundation of happiness both of private families and of Commonwealths.  Almost all governments have, therefore, made it a principal object of their attention, to establish and endow with proper revenues, such seminaries of learning as might supply the succeeding age with men qualified to serve the public with honor to themselves and to their country."

Jefferson, Adams, Madison, Hamilton, Washington and more disagreed about many things, but not about the importance of protecting property; neither about the importance of investing in public higher education--for the individual students and their families, but more importantly for the security of our nation and the support of the free market.

And it was not just the founding generation.  The Civil War generation and the 'greatest generation' after WWII made land grants and the GI Bill priority investments: an educated citizenry has been a top priority for every generation of American leaders.

Until recently.

From our founding until the 1980s America had an increasingly high quality educational system, for decades the best on the planet.

In the 1970s Pell Grants covered 80% of the cost (tuition, room & board) of attending a four-year public university.  In 2012, they cover 31%.

Between 1990 and 2010 State support for college students decreased 26%.  In that same period, tuition increased 113%.

Faculty salaries have just kept up with inflation and the quality of educational facilities on campuses has declined as the exploding number of highly paid administrators shifted funds to pay for football stadiums, fancy rec-centers, and a wide range of services only tangentially related to teaching and learning.

At this point we are at a cross roads.  We can continue on this path and watch a proud legacy and powerful national resource disappear.  Or we can wake up and come together, right and left, Republicans and Democrats, Greens and Libertarians, North and South, faculty and administrator to figure this out.

We are no longer the world's only dominant economy, so it stands to reason that like federal, state, and local governments...like big and small businesses, universities need to tighten our belts.  If we cannot pay our own bills, the lights will go off.  Plain and simple.

The leaders who have slowly hollowed out our higher education system need to partner with faculty to save a national treasure.  At a university, job one is to meet our students where they are to help them get to where they want to be...and no plan to do this that is not faculty-driven can succeed.  (Unless success is increasing administrative positions and salaries.)