Word: 80s
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...suddenly, with a shifting of economic winds, contraction is the order of the day. As state, federal and private sources of funds dry up and bills from the fast-spending '80s come due, even the most elite colleges find themselves facing a financial crunch that promises to reshape the contours of higher education. "Now they have to pay for their prosperity," says Robert Rosenzweig, president of the Association of American Universities in Washington. "It is the morning after...
While the pinch at private schools has been tightening for some time, troubles cascaded rather suddenly upon the public campuses. State governments, having lavished funds on their colleges in the '80s, are grappling with large budget deficits, declining tax revenues and increased outlays as a result of the recession...
...expansion of rights goes on without the other half of citizenship: attachment to duties and obligations. We are seeing a public recoil from formal politics, from the active, reasoned exercise of citizenship. It comes because we don't trust anyone. It is part of the cafard the '80s induced: Wall Street robbery, the savings and loan scandal, the wholesale plunder of the economy, an orgy released by Reaganomics that went on for years with hardly a peep from Congress -- events whose numbers were so huge as to be beyond the comprehension of most people...
...80s brought the retreat and virtual disappearance of the American left as a political, as distinct from a cultural, force. It went back into the monastery -- that is, to academe -- and also extruded out into the art world, where it remains even more marginal and impotent. Meanwhile, a considerable and very well-subsidized industry arose, hunting the lefty academic or artist in his or her retreat. Republican attack politics turned on culture, and suddenly both academe and the arts were full of potential Willie Hortons. The lowbrow form of this was the ire of figures like Senator Helms...
...late '80s, while American academics were emptily theorizing that language and the thinking subject were dead, the longing for freedom and . humanistic culture was demolishing European tyranny. Of course, if the Chinese students had read their Foucault, they would have known that repression is inscribed in all language, their own included, and so they could have saved themselves the trouble of facing the tanks in Tiananmen Square. But did Vaclav Havel and his fellow playwrights free Czechoslovakia by quoting Derrida or Lyotard on the inscrutability of texts? Assuredly not: they did it by placing their faith in the transforming power...