Social Investment in Massachusetts Public Higher Education: A Comparative Analysis

State expenditures on public higher education are increasingly viewed as a social investment that is necessary to sustain economic growth in a postindustrial economy. However, an analysis of comparative data indicates that state support for such education was below national averages during the 1980s and, when compared to its major competitor states, Massachusetts ranks poorly in support for these institutions. This article concludes that unless state support is increased over the next decade, Massachusetts will risk losing its competitive economic position, while educational administrators will be forced to choose between access or quality in public higher education

What Comes After the Critique of the Corporate University? Toward a Syndicalist University

For the past three decades, university faculty have produced a cascade of contemporary protest literature that routinely criticizes the knowledge factory, academic capitalism, managed professionals, college for sale, the university in ruins, the corporate corruption of higher education, and University, Inc. University faculty are regularly warned about the fall of the faculty, the last professors, and the last intellectuals. This article reviews the historical development of the corporate and neoliberal university, but it takes the next step of asking what is to be done after the critique of the corporate university. It calls on faculty to engage in a variety of direct actions that circumvent established faculty institutions and proposes a new type of syndicalist university that is owned and managed by faculty. The legitimating principle of this revolution in university control is a principle that has long been accepted in classical liberal, Marxist, and anarcho-syndicalist theory – the right of first generation and the labor theory of value

The Clean Water Act: Financing Combined Sewer Overflow Projects

In 1987 Congress expanded the scope of the Clean Water Act to include combined sewer overflows (CSOs) despite continuing to reduce federal assistance for water-pollution abatement and despite the fact that CSO abatement is far more costly than previous water-quality mandates. As a result, many low-income deindustrializing cities are now subject to an additional federal mandate that many of them cannot afford without extensive federal or state assistance. The authors conclude that, in lieu of increased federal funding for CSO abatement, U.S. Environmental Protection Agency regulatory guidelines and the Clean Water Act be amended to include an assessment of the fiscal and economic impact of CSO mandates. Such action would provide a basis for targeting the available resources where needs are greatest and the effect of CSO abatement is likely to result in tangible beneficial uses

God, money, and the state : the spirits of American Empire

Recently, there has been increasing research in the inefficency in spectrum utilization, which is mainly caused by fixed spectrum allocation policies. There are some proposed approaches to solve this inefficiency, like Dynamic Spectrum Access (DSA), which allows users to share spectrum resources. Implementing DSA in a distributed way can avoid problems with system complexity that can arise in centralized DSA systems; however, it can create incentives for the users to behave selfishly. Selfish behavior reduces the sfficiency of the DSA system, and it causes the system to end up in one of many possible operating points, which makes the performance analysis difficult. In this work, we study a multichannel random access system with selfish users and we propose two mechanisms in which the access point charges users for transmissioon. We analyze the performance of these mechanisms using Game Theory. Results show that by charging users for transmission, we can reduce the possible operating points of the system to a single one. Of the two proposed mechanisms, the per-channel cost mechanism performs rather well, bringing the system sum utility close to that of scheduling systems

Reflections on Universities, Politics, and the Capitalist State: An Interdisciplinary and Intergenerational Discussion with Clyde W. Barrow

Since its publication in 1990, Clyde W. Barrow’s book, Universities and the Capitalist State: Corporate Liberalism and the Reconstruction of American Higher Education, 1894-1928, has been a touchstone text for generations of scholars studying higher education. This conversation between Barrow, Heather Steffen, and Isaac Kamola examines the book’s legacy in order to explore how the interdisciplinary study of higher education has changed over the past three decades. In doing so, they examine the space and place of academic knowledge and academic labor, offering an interdisciplinary discussion of critical praxis within the university

Measuring Market Saturation in the U.S. Casino Industry: An Analytical and Empirical Analysis

The national and regional economies in the U.S. remain on a slow growth trajectory, while the casino gaming industry has seen a rapid and ongoing expansion. Consequently, states, Native American tribes, and gaming operators have increasingly shifted their attention from gaming expansion to the problems of regional competition, cannibalization, market maturation, and market saturation. The question of “market saturation” has become a salient point of public policy debate and a topic that is now frequently raised in the industry and media. This paper analyzes the concept of saturation in the context of casino gaming markets and compares several metrics for measuring saturation. We examine several markets widely acknowledged and accepted by the industry as being “saturated” to assess the sufficiency of these metrics for determining whether a market is saturated

Marxist Political Theory, Diversity of Tactics, and the Doctrine of the Long Civil War

In The Communist Manifesto (1848), Marx and Engels “openly declare that their ends can be attained only by the forcible overthrow of all existing social conditions.” However, by 1872, Marx suggested that in some countries it was possible for workers to “achieve their aims by peaceful means.” Since that time, Marxist political theorists have debated whether a transition to socialism can be achieved by parliamentary means alone or whether the transition to socialism requires the use of illegal or even violent tactics. This paper argues that with the resurgence of a socialist movement in the US, the question of tactics is once again an open debate. For this reason, it is useful to revisit the tactical debates of the Second International, because they are directly relevant to contemporary discussions of socialist strategy and tactics in the US, where tactical positions already run the gamut from parliamentarism to armed self-defense

There are Better Alternatives than Easton: A Critical Rejoinder to William J. Kelleher

In the last issue of this journal, Dr William J. Kelleher claimed that my earlier discussion of the intellectual origins of the CNPS has some serious misconceptions which may obscure the formation of a clear vision of the Caucus’s options for future endeavors. His main concern is that I misunderstand David Easton’s systematic political theory, which Kelleher argues may provide a bridge between official political science and a more radical political science. I appreciate Dr Kelleher’s willingness to critically engage the on-going discussion within the CNPS about what constitutes critical and radical political science, but I remain convinced that there are better (and more radical) alternatives to Easton’s systems analysis