

this misses what happened to public colleges, like the land grant colleges you mention. at the height of counterculture, campuses exposed everyone to powerful ideas that made them do all kinds of organizing against the establishment. for example in 1970 the Ohio National Guard was called onto Kent State University and fired over sixty rounds into anti-war protestors, killing four. Ronald Reagan became California Governor, defunded universities, and introduced tuition to stop this onset of class consciousness; in his words, to bar “undesirables” from college. then in 1975, NYC went almost bankrupt, and regretfully adopted the same measures upon the City University system in a ton of cuts to tackle $14 billion and growing in debt. thus the same policies spread across the rest of the US. a similar reason is why the “leftist” party in Britain managed to landslide against 20 years of Conservative rule by promising to introduce tuition.

it’s composed in a way that’s both really good and something AI probably won’t do