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To: TEACHSOC@maple.lemoyne.edu
From: TR Young <TR.Young@uvm.edu>
Subject: White Collar Crime
Cc: socgrad@csf.colorado.edu
Going to college/university is a public trust...not a private
purchase.  Students do not 'pay' for their education...most
often parents pay a third or a half but all the time a goodly
share of the costs of education is paid by the taxpayers...

....and most of the infra-structure upon which education is built
was built by people long since dead...both material infra-structure
which includes buildings, furnishings, water, sewage, roads,
power and print media.

The cultural infra-structure was created and preserved by count-
less generations of scholars, artists, philosophers, mathematicians,
and now scientists.  

It is a fraud and a fiction to say that one pays for ones own
education...it is a politics and a poetry to count the costs only
in terms on what teachers are paid, staff are paid, maintenance
people are paid.

Going to college is a public trust...cutting class is a form of
white collar crime nowise different from workers stealing from
employers; not a whit different from physicians sending a nurse
or a PA in to do medical procedures for which the doctor is paid.

Administrators who make policy which put forth such fiction are,
themselves, abdicating the responsibility of their office to 
supervise the knowledge process.  Such policy may win a thin
legitimacy with students and with those parents who contribute
to the university but they constitute abdiction from the trust
embedded in the office...you may clip this post and send it along
to the Deans and Provosts in universities which set such policy.

Along with the market place analogy there is the argument that 
university students are mature adults and can manage their own 
priorities, the thought amazes.  One would thus set aside all 
norms, all sanctions, all rules, all laws, all taboos and all 
requirements under the premise that a) the university is a free 
market and b) students are knowledgeable customers.  This from
administrators who don't know WH Auden from CW Mills...and who
value phys ed courses on the same scale as Shakespeare or Marx.

                                                        TR Young