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I watched slack jawed in my bed at the origins of neoliberal ideology across the pond, and thought of my current research project on the privatization of public education which began under the reign of Reagan, the shockingly more intelligent and early version of the U.S’s latest thief in command. As I watched poor princess Diana vomit into oblivion, I too felt queasy at the visual rendition of the same neoliberal policies that would, some 40 odd years later, manifest itself as the largest impediment to college and a stable middle class life for the grand majority of my high school students in the greater NYC area. But more on that to come. I was luckily jolted out of my brain fog by Tuesday’s NPR Marketplace which revealed data about the gross income inequality that has continued to grow worse since 1975, Reagan’s last year in office and the very beginning of what we now call neoliberalism. What a coincidence! The Rand Corporation study shows that the median income in 1975 was 26k and the median income in 2018 was 50k. But, if you adjust for inflation, 1975’s 26k now translates to 90k. Which is to say, the median income in the U.S. should be 90k. Do I need to say more? I know for many of you reading this, the word “neoliberalism” has a faintly acerbic taste, vaguely familiar but ultimately suspiciously foreign to our moral taste buds. However you choose to call it-- Reaganomics, supply-side economics, or the deregulation and privatization of public programs, I think the time has come we all reckon with the data of it all. And with the data, that is numbers representing lives and human experiences, we must also talk about education. Which brings me to this week’s post-phd, “Myth of Meritocracies (Revisited)”. It’s a part of a series I’m doing called “Toxic Academia,” and you can find related posts on my archive page. In this posts, I will lay out the lit review I conducted into the systemic flaws of higher education, how that fits into the history of education writ large, and whenever possible, link to PDFs. Of course, this information is not peer reviewed, but the beauty of a blog is that you can just take my bibliography and come to your own conclusions. Let me know what you think, and what you think academics should be doing. cheers, Allison
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