Transcript of Second HEPI Annual lecture: the destruction of public higher education in America and how the UK can avoid the same fate by Robert Reich, Clinton’s Secretary of Labor, is now available.
Let me just assure you that first of all I have spent half of my adult life in the public sector in the government of the United States and politics and the other half of my adult life in academe in the United States as a Professor. In government I became something of an expert in Washington politics and in academe I have inadvertently become something of an expert in academic politics. There is a difference. There is a relationship, at least in the United States, where Washington politics is shall we say “dog eat dog” and academic politics is precisely the reverse. [Word doc]
The focus group, the marketing people, thought that Arcadia denoted something wonderfully rural and sublime, romantic and so it would be Arcadia. But instead of college the marketing people also discovered that most American parents preferred university to college, university sounded larger and more serious. So Beaver College became Arcadia University. And interestingly applications to Arcadia University soared. So the marketing people were to that extent correct. [Word doc]
