ET TU, BERKELEY?

Posted at 8:10 a.m. ET

Guess who's coming to the Bailout Ball? 

With the Big Three seeking a bailout from Washington, the Big Ten are following suit. Earlier this week the Carnegie Corporation of New York took out a two-page ad in the New York Times, signed by executives of 36 public universities, state university systems and higher-education associations, urging Congress and President-elect Obama to rescue them.

Are you not excited?  Before any "rescue" (from what?), the rescuers should demand real economizing and a shutdown of frivolous, propagandistic departments.

The university chiefs seek an additional "federal infusion of capital" -- as much as $45 billion -- to build new facilities, especially "green" ones.

Ah, the trendy.  Colleges do it so well.

The Higher Education Investment Act, as the university chiefs call their proposed bailout, would allow them to make an end run around parsimonious state lawmakers.

Is there any good in this idea?

Yet American higher education might benefit from more parsimony. Economist Richard Vedder has shown that large government subsidies already contribute to making universities "relatively inefficient institutions partly sheltered from the discipline of the market -- a discipline that provides incentives for cost reductions, product improvement, and innovation." The more subsidies rise, the higher tuitions seem to go. If taxpayers are going to shovel out more money to these schools, the academic executives should at least allow outsiders to perform a cost "restructuring."

Right on.  Each of us can make a list.  Start with those vastly expensive "packets" that admissions offices send out to prospects.  Have you seen them?  Some are worthy of Neiman-Marcus. 

Then we can move on to ethnic-specific graduations.  Everyone in the class graduates together, as in real schools.

Next we can shutter these special "offices" that have sprung up since the sixties - like, "Office of Diversity, Gender Equality and Anti-Military Affairs."  Believe me, it's almost come to that in some places.

We'll have a very long list before a dollar is spent, if a dollar is ever spent.

December 18, 2008.