New College of California Is on Deathbed

[flowomo]

Source: InsideHigherEd.com

(snip)
Circumstances at New College of California have deteriorated to the point that it isn’t operating.
Those faculty members still hanging on – who have not been paid since early November and whose health benefits recently lapsed without notice – are, while still holding out hope for salvation, trying to put together plans to “teach out” the current crop of students and potentially find a home for some of the progressive college’s unique programs at other institutions....

By fall, enrollment had dropped 41 percent. The progressive, quirky San Francisco College, with degrees in activism and social change and women’s spirituality in addition to law and teacher education, considered declaring bankruptcy.
(snip)

Read more: http://insidehighered.com/news/2008/02/11/newcollege

[Cant trust em]

1. They've been having problems for quite a while

Their leadership hasn't been keeping the academic standars, how shall we say?, up to snuff.

[underpants]

2. Like Anitoch lots of bad choices were made

and I will surely hear about this one from my Repub relatives. They count these as WINS.

[BrklynLiberal]

3. "Tis better to have tried and failed than to have not tried at all."

The men who try to do something and fail are infinitely better than those who try nothing and succeed.
- Lloyd Jones

It is hard to fail, but it is worse to never have tried to succeed. In this life we get nothing, save by effort.
- Teddy Roosevelt

[Robbien]

4. Progressives have a huge problem doing fund raising

And when they do do it, other Progressives get all hot and bothered and start complaining. Even here at DU, threads start up all the time complaining that the DU site does fund raising through pledge drives and ad revenue.

Bah!

[damntexdem]

5. Too bad -- I remember New College fondly.

From nearly 20 years ago.

[Peace Patriot]

6. Ever see that hilarious, dark comedy song and dance called "Money" in the

movie (and broadway production) "Cabaret"?

Mid-Depression, pre-Hitler (just on the horizon) Germany. It was the excessively greedy--"organized money," as FDR called it--that brought Germany down, as much as Hitler himself and his brownshirt thugs. And Lisa Minelli's and Joel Gray's unforgettable movie performance of that song--"Money"--seers it into your mind. When "organized money" gets as out-of-control as it was then, and as it is now, unthinkable horrors result--like the slaughter of 1.2 million innocent Iraqis to get their oil, like the "president" asserting powers of torture, like credit card usury and gas gouging, like deliberate efforts to destabilize democratic government and progressive society--stolen elections, shredding the Constitution--while so-called liberals do nothing, or collude.

I don't know if the New College's financial troubles are yet another symptom of "Money" gone mad, but it's worth considering the possibility that "organized money" doesn't want leftist (majorityist) activists in the professions right now--as lawyers, teachers, government employees, NGO human rights organizers, administrators, corporate science lab techs, and other college-degree-required locations in our society. (The New College School of Law is one of the best for creating high consciousness lawyers who advocate for the poor, and in the public interest.) Maybe that's why the funds dried up. Hard to say. I don't know the details. (But I did see another leftist college go down, for these very reasons, during the Reagan era. Fascist "organized money" called in the loans.)

If nothing else, it's depressing--adding to deliberate disempowerment and disenfranchisment of the great progressive American majority that we have seen in other spheres--such as the fascist/corporate media spewing its MINORITY garbage 24/7.

And maybe it's not symptomatic--just the breaks, for New College. Maybe the money is going to other good causes. As I said, hard to say, but worth looking into.

And, by the way, San Francisco--for all its fabled leftism--is just about a wholly owned subsidiary of Gap Inc. and its multi-billionaire Fisher family founders, some of the worst "bad actors" on matters of global corporate piracy and predation (sweatshops in foreign lands, WTO, oil economy, environmental destruction--clear-cutting of redwoods, use of pesticides, in No. California, use of cotton from pesticide-dead Uzbekistan, privatization of public property, and on and on). What these SF billionaires say, goes. Did New College leftists do something to offend them? (Say, oppose Donald Fisher's acquisition of the Presidio?) Did the Fishers dry up New College funds? It's worth asking.

-----------------

http://www.newcollege.edu/