Campus Roundup

The Speaker of the House of Representatives, Nancy Pelosi’s answer to the problem of soaring college costs is a problem in itself according to research. With Pelosi having shown that she intends to “increase Pell Grants by $17.3 billion and slash student loan interest rates in half from 6.8 percent to 3.4 percent,” as reported by the Young America’s Foundation (YAF), a variety of groups, both conservative and liberal, have expressed more than just reservations.

Jason Mattera, a spokesman for YAF, argues that “Colleges and Universities are NOT short on cash”. The Chronicle of Higher Education found that the endowments of the America’s top 50 schools all tower above one billion dollars. When it comes to the Ivies, Harvard, Princeton, and Yale, have endowments of $25, $17, and $11 billion, respectively.

Add to that, endowments ranging from $100 million to $900 million are afforded to 227 colleges and universities, with an additional 141 possessing endowments that surpass $50 million. According to the Brooking’s Institution’s Lois Rice, the proposal “is clearly designed to try to ease the burden of paying for college, and that’s laudable…” The Brookings scholar, though, did not refrain from pointing out that “there could be some very severe and probably unintended consequences.”

As reported on CNS News.com, Rice said that “lowering the interest rate for students could in many ways encourage greater borrowing.” “The College Board reports that since Congress ratified the Higher Education Act in 1965, tuition has escalated 44 percent,” reported the Young America’s Foundation in a press release.

Intro to Death by Government

Textbooks on political science need to be modernized to recognize political realities, according to Professor R.J. Rummel of the University of Hawaii. Prof. Rummel’s Death By Government measures the life-taking propensities of state governments, using charts and statistics developed from an analysis of 8,200 sources, involving over 4,200 consolidations and calculations. Although governments are meant to protect, and for others, even provide, for those they serve, secular states in the 20th Century murdered over 169 million of their own citizens! In this 500-page-book, Prof. Rummel coins the word “demicide” for mass murder by governments.

While most textbooks refer to the functions of government as: “Law and Order”, “Individual security”, “Cultural Maintenance” and “Social Welfare,” Professor Rummel found that “We have numerous examples of governments that killed hundreds of thousands and even millions of their own citizens, enslave the rest and abolish traditional culture.”

Garreth Bloor is an intern at Accuracy in Media.