Putting affordable public education on ICE...

So, the cat (not Spooky) is out of the bag, and Sexton's self-important, self-congratulatory ICE "idea" is really just, after all is said and done, self serving.

One of Sexton's main points is that funding should be spread less thinly and given mostly to private universities, with a caveat that they must partner with other institutions, like public colleges and K-12 schools, to use it.

He used the analogy of science grants, where funding would be given to a "principal investigator" - in this case, the private university - who would be required to work alongside a "secondary investigator," a public university.

"If NYU were going to get a grant, it'd be the principal investigator," Sexton said. "It might get 60 percent or 70 percent of the grant, but 30 or 40 percent would have to be with a partner that was in the public sector - so City University [of New York] or [State University of New York] Stony Brook."

You read that correctly. the state should funnel massive amounts of public money to private, union busting, real estate speculating, second tier institutions, which we should then trust to dispense for the public good because NYU has such a great track record on such matters.

Oh wait. No they don't.

But last year, WSN spoke with adjunct professors who criticized NYU for overinvesting in high-profile, "celebrity" faculty instead of the rest of its faculty.

The adjuncts complained that higher-profile faculty worked fewer hours, had longer sabbaticals and are often busier doing research than teaching classes, leaving most of the grunt work to graduate students and adjuncts.

Sexton called the argument a "false dichotomy built on a false premise." He said NYU does not engage in free agency, nor does it pay premiums or set markets to attract faculty.

Ha. It'd be too gauche to name names here, but this is one of the more ridiculous Sexton claims the WSN has ever been dumb enough to print.

George H.W. Bush might have called all of this voodoo academics, but he would have been racist to do so. It's neoliberalism, pure and simple. Slash public education, give the money to undeservedly elite private universities, and let the wealth trickle down!

Oh, and it's totally connected to the university's global geography of expansion and real estate speculation!

"We'd rather have you say, 'Wow, this is one of the ICE capitals of the world - I'm looking out at these places, I don't feel like moving to the two in China, I'm not ready to move to Abu Dhabi, I don't want to move to Paris. I want to stay in the United States, so it's a choice between New York and a couple other places and this ICE stuff is good," he said.

Sweet!