An advisor to then-California Gov. Ronald Reagan in 1970 wrote in a re-election campaign memo that free college education would produce a “danger” to society in the form of an “educated proletariat.”
“We have to be selective on who we allow to go through higher education,” wrote Roger A. Freeman, an education advisor to the future president.
Another memo, written by conservative lawyer Lewis Powell in 1971, a year before he would be appointed to the U.S. Supreme Court in 1972, proposed making college so expensive that students would graduate in so much debt that they’d be less likely to work against corporate interests.
I didn’t know of the Powell memo in 1994 when I bailed on law school, but that decision was based on a realization that the debt that I’d be signing up for to work toward a law degree would make it so that I wouldn’t be able to do with that degree what I’d wanted to do.
I’d wanted to be a civil rights lawyer, but $100,000-plus in student loans, it occurred to 22-year-old me, was a lot of damn money, too much for a public-service lawyer to ever be able to pay back.
Coming to that realization, it was either, law school, then get a job with a firm doing all manner of inane things to be able to earn a salary that would allow me to pay bills and also all that money back; or just forego law school altogether, and figure out another way to save the world.
From 1970, 1971, 1994, into 2022, and today’s gemmed up controversy over President Biden’s executive order forgiving a relatively small amount of student debt.
The $10,000 being forgiven is a drop in the bucket for what most have to borrow to be able to work toward their degrees, but even so, it’s socialism, according to some on the right, who, not surprisingly, had no problem with socialism in the form of PPP loans that were forgiven for many of them in full.
Welfare, to these chuckers, is only welfare when it’s working- and middle-class people who are benefitting from it.
The bigger thing to me is, we need to get more people to being the most productive versions of themselves that they can be.
And just as a piece of land only has value if you invest in it, building roads and other infrastructure – water, sewer, fiber, the rest – a person has more value the more that we put into him, her, them.
Be it college, trade school, education in technology, whatever, it’s silly to think, as Roger A. Freeman did in 1970, that an “educated proletariat” is a “danger.”
And as for Powell, his mindset, that there’s some benefit to society in having people in debt after college, so that they can’t work against corporate interests, it’s people with that mindset that are the “danger.”
Is this the only way corporatism wins, by using people’s desires to be better people against them, making college part of what holds people back from being the best version of themselves that they can be?
In my case, I’m not sure civil rights lawyer was ultimately the best version of me that I could be, so I’m OK with how things turned out.
I’m just glad that I figured out the game before I got played by it.
For the millions who didn’t get jolted to the reality until after they’d already gone deep into debt, the only problem with Biden’s action on student debt this week was that the president didn’t go nearly far enough.
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Chris Graham
