Size matters:
You can deduce something about politicians by the sheer size of the particular projects they embrace. Three Republican Governors of Massachusetts alibi'd down the line for the "Big Dig" a steroidal behemoth of a highway project that is now billions and billions of dollars over budget.
All three of these Governors combined a naive' lack of oversight on the project with a stern belief in the Big Dig's glorious destiny....
But that great hole in the ground in Boston nears a lamentable completion, so our new Governor Willard Mitt Romney but go far afield to find a new monument to his emerging greatness.
Alas not six weeks in office he's alighted on "improving" the State Universtiy system by expanding Umass Amherst, raising tuition, appointing the local Babbitts to a "business advisory council" and supposedly when the coast is clear and no one is looking, privatizing the whole shebang.
The Late Right Honorable Huey Long was also obsessed with "improving" Louisiana State University,though mostly he tried to micro-manage the football team from the Governor's Office.
Would that Romney had the same noble fixations.
Umass Amherst has a reputation as a rural party school that is somewhat deceptive. When I went there as a grad student a decade ago the school was filled with lower middle class kids studying unthreatening things like business admin or computer programming. It's a university primarily geared to kids who are too smart for the junior college route and too poor to afford a private school.
Raising tuition isn't going to change things it'll only increase the student loan debt burden of tomorrow's incoming freshmen.
This from a yanker who promised not to raise taxes....except on students.
But ah, a siren destiny beckons to our new governor, cripple select and helpless cohorts with ruinous fees, slash services to nothing, reform education by raisng tuition and increasing class size...AND THEN jet off to D.C. to claim his laurel crown for haiving "saved" Massachusetts with his venture capitalist acumen.
Meanwhile Amherst Massachusetts will decline into a vast exburban wasteland dotted with giant chain stores chargint too much money to overindebted students while the campus sprawls north to St. Albans and West to Albany.
By the time all this happens, Romney will no doubt be Secretary of Education or Vice President and eager to export his modern of no-nonsense higher education reform to the rest of the galaxy.
Ghod help us...