July 2017 Acquisitions

Books:
Shannon Hale and LeUyen Pham, Real Friends, 2017.
Gail Herman et al, Who Was Jackie Robinson? , 2010.
Ellen Labrecque et al, Who Was Frank Lloyd Wright?, 2015.
Avery Monsen and Jory John. All My Friends Are Dead, 2010.
Lynda Rosen Obst, The Sixties, 1978.
Bill Scollon, The Hidden Mickeys of Disneyland, 2015.
Ernest Tidyman, Shaft, 2016
David F. Walker, Shaft's Revenge, 2015.

DVDs:
American Experience: 1964, 2014. 
Lego DC Comics Superheroes: Justice League--Gotham City Breakout, 2016.
The Twilight Zone: The Complete Series, 2016.

Should Have Used Odorono

"It was in the folk-revival circuit, where older black artists met white purists with ties to the old left and (perhaps exaggerated) ideas about authenticity, that the tinder really caught. No one was attacked as personally or virulently as Bob Dylan in the wake of what critic Nat Hentoff called 'the newest commercial boom, "folk-rock" … an outgrowth, in large part, of Dylan's recent decision—decried as a "sellout" by folknik purists—to perform with a rock 'n' roll combo.' When he was asked in one 1965 interview about the hate mail he received after going electric, Dylan described being called a 'Sellout, fink, Fascist, Red, everything in the book.'"

Franz Nicolay at Slate writes a history of "selling out."

Against the Rocks of a Lifetime

"But each generation must be as forgetful as the last—50 years later, we've barely begun to reckon with the implications of these uprisings, let alone address their root causes. So often, the reactions to these conflicts follow a woefully familiar script: paramilitary policing that only exacerbates the turmoil, sensationalistic media coverage that distorts public understanding, followed at last by a feckless government reports that says much of what the black community already knows and does little of what it needs.

"'The headline hasn’t much changed since 1967 in terms of how we remember those riots,' Dr. Khalil Gibran Muhammad, a professor of history, race, and public policy at Harvard, said in an interview. 'The critique from the black community is seen as illegitimate in most arenas of American life, so the longer-term response has been the explicit or veiled message that society was not to blame.'"

Noah Remnick at The Atlantic looks back on the Newark Riot of 1967.

"A Consuming Obsession with Sin"

"Given the right’s religious base, it’s not all that surprising that conservatives focus on moral transgressions—whether they violate God's divine law, America’s founding ideals of liberty, '50s-style norms of sexual behavior and good housekeeping, or other codes of conduct. But the left can be prudish and judgmental about the evils it holds in special contempt, too. On college campuses in particular, activists often take an almost religious approach to politics, rooted in a belief—sometimes stated, sometimes implied—in the irredeemable sin of America and its mainstream. Their work on vital issues gets diverted from real-world objectives and takes on the character of a church revival, with rituals to express its believers' sin and salvation, and a fundamentalist attention to language and doctrine.
"The late American philosopher Richard Rorty famously argued in his 1998 book, Achieving Our Country, that this inward-looking dogmatism and zealotry was a major problem for the left. To a self-destructive degree, activists rejected dissent and criticism of their hallowed principles. They alienated the uninitiated with their join-us-or-else self-righteousness, undermining public support for the important causes they cared about. They turned away with disdain from any whiff of political power, elitism, or national pride, thus depriving themselves of some of the tools they needed to bring about tangible changes to policy."

Victor Tan Chen at The Atlantic criticizes "the cultural left."

"Birkenstocked Burkeans"

"All I can tell you is that the crunchy-granola lefties are often right about little things that make life richer. Take food, for example. After we married, Julie and I had to teach ourselves how to cook. We quickly discovered how much better food tastes if it hasn’t been processed. We'd go to farmers' markets in the city to buy produce, and before we knew it, we were making and canning our own apple butter. Not only did the stuff taste dramatically better than what was on offer in the supermarket, but there was a real sense of pride in knowing how to do these things for ourselves, like our grandmothers did. We realized one day that pretty much the only young to middle-aged people we knew who cared about these things were … lefties."

National Review hosts Rod Dreher's 2002 article on "Granola Conservatives."

"It Will Endure"

"The desire on the right to destroy Obamacare will probably never disappear. In 2005, 70 years after the establishment of Social Security, confident Republicans sought to privatize the hallowed program. That, too, was a painful failure. And there is a lesson in this. While elections swing back and forth between right and left, there is a reason that the United States is more humane place today than it was 25 or 50 years ago. Social Security, civil rights, Medicare, Medicaid, and Obamacare have survived. Legalized child labor, supply-side economics, and unlimited pollution have withered. Ideas that bring real improvement to peoples' lives have more staying power than ideas that do not."

Jonathan Chait at New York writes that how Obamacare "has survived against such fanatical opposition, and committed sabotage, is a testament to the law’s strength."

And Chait continues to discuss how President Obama's policies will continue.

"Bad Policy, Bad Strategy, Bad Politics, Bad Legal Maneuvering, Bad Optics, a Self-Defeating Venture Carried Out Via Deranged-as-Usual Tweets and Public Insults"

"Trump hasn't had a stroke or suffered a neurological disaster, and his behavior in the White House is no different from the behavior he manifested consistently while winning enough votes to take the presidency.

"But he is nonetheless clearly impaired, gravely deficient somewhere at the intersection of reason and judgment and conscience and self-control. Pointing this out is wearying and repetitive, but still it must be pointed out.

""You can be as loyal as Jeff Sessions and still suffer the consequences of that plain and inescapable truth: This president should not be the president, and the sooner he is not, the better."

Ross Douthat at The New York Times lays into Donald Trump.

"We Live In an Era That Suffers From This 'Eclipse of Utopias'"

"Many readers may feel perplexed at Traverso's persistent attachment to the ideal of communism when the actual record of Soviet-bloc party-dictatorship was 'left-wing' only in name. (You don't mourn a regime that murdered millions; you cheer its demise.) Between political reality and political aspiration, however, there is always a kind of wound. Every ideal, no matter how inspiring, carries with it a feeling of sadness at how far the world falls short, and melancholia is nothing but the name for the space between."

At The Boston Review, Peter E. Gordon reviews Enzo Traverso's Left-Wing Melancholia: Marxism, History, and Memory.

Stupid Einstein

"No, the ultimate joke is on viewers who might scoff at David's foolishness while nursing similar anxieties about the possibility of finding fulfillment. Indeed, Brooks sneaks in a little poke at the crowd by opening the film with an overheard radio interview of the legendary critic Rex Reed, who complains about the laugh-out-loud mob mentality of a comedy-movie audience. Chuckle all you want, Brooks is saying—but that doesn't mean you’re too different from his protagonist. After just weeks on the road, David and Linda resolve to fix their new crisis (a lack of money) by begging for their old jobs back, and it works, though their salaries are slightly reduced. That's what amounts to a (relatively) happy ending for Brooks: a depressing return to the status quo."

David Sims at The Atlantic revisits Albert Brooks's Lost in America.

"This Is the Type of Speech and Exhortation to Bridge Divides"

"'We must continue to hold out to them the invitation to work with us for the common good,' he said, in contrast to Trumps rambling tale of cocktail parties, yachts and the evils of Obamacare and the media.
"'I hope that you young men in the Boy Scout movement, in this country and other countries, will take home from this Jamboree a clearer understanding of the meaning of human brotherhood. I hope that you will work for freedom and peace with the same burning faith that inspired the men of George Washington’s army here at Valley Forge,' Truman concluded in his 1950 speech."

The Bangor Daily News compares Donald Trump's speech to the Boy Scouts to Harry Truman's speech in sixty-seven years ago.

"This Book Is About Celebrating Resistance"

"The comic book series opens a year after the release of a presidential executive order to deport all immigrants, which led to California declaring itself a Sanctuary State. 'As you can imagine, things escalated quickly,' Pizzolo explains. 'When our story begins, martial law has been in place in California for over a year. The series follows two twenty-something rebels who continue to resist, after they escape from a prison camp in Occupied Los Angeles. Working with the Pacific Coast Sister Cities Resistance, they continue to rise up against the government. … It's informed by the issues we're all currently facing and inspired by comics like V for Vendetta and films like Battle of Algiers."

Graeme McMillan at The Hollywood Reporter talks with Matteo Pizzolo, the author of the new comic book Calexit.

"This Historical Distinction Between Liberalism and Socialism Has Resurfaced"

"The gulf between liberalism and Old Left ideas—socialist ideas—has only grown since the 1930s. Unlike liberals, who emerged from the 1960s prioritizing the political freedoms associated with individual rights, the socialist left has posited that most people—the working class—remain effectively powerless if capitalists control work, wages and welfare.  In their view, the left's mission—the reason for its existence—ought to be expanding the idea of political freedom to include economic freedom."

Andrew Hartman at The Washington Post argues that "The left is back--and millennials are leading the way."

"Liberals Have Supplanted Conservatives as Moralizing Busybodies"

"Social norms against overt expressions of racism have been an important driver of improved social relations in the past 60 years. Sometimes it's a fine political and moral strategy to make people feel guilty—if what they're doing is bad enough, and if there's a strong enough consensus that it is bad.
"The problem with the liberal busybodying is not that it passes any judgments on individual behavior, but that the judgments have become too numerous, too specific, and too frequently changing. Following all the rules has become exhausting."

Josh Barro at Business Insider tells liberals that they "can win again if they stop being so annoying."

Steven W Thrasher at The Guardian calls Democrats "pathetic."

Emmet Penney at Paste warns against liberal "lectureporn."

Thomas Frank at The Guardian says that journalists are "utterly oblivious to how they appear to the rest of America."

Bryce Covert at The New Republic reacts to the Democrats' "A Better Deal" campaign.

And Lee Drutman in The New York Times writes that he has found "one area of notable discord between Clinton and Sanders supporters—their degree of disaffection with political institutions."

"Historians Find Evidence Of Nation's Founding Lobbyists' Campaign To Influence Constitution"

"Evidence also suggests that the original lobbyists were skilled in dampening opposition to their clients' agendas. Recovered ledgers revealed that an early attempt at universal healthcare—via a welfare clause in Article IV—was voted down after an advocate for the Apothecaries Guild procured front-row duel tickets for the entire Pennsylvania delegation.According to witness accounts of the time, the Constitution's authors were regularly spotted in the colonies' most exclusive taverns, where a different member of the wax or beaver pelt lobbies would cover their exorbitant three-figure tabs and lavish them with exquisite silk garments and spices from beyond the Orient. Preserved woodcuts depict a number of Founding Fathers relaxing on the palm-lined beaches of Hispaniola as they and their families enjoyed luxury accommodations courtesy of the sugarcane industry."

From The Onion.

"The Power to Translate Its Ideological Principles into Practical Government Is Utterly Beyond Its Reach"

"In truth, it was never possible to reconcile public standards for a humane health-care system with conservative ideology. In a pure market system, access to medical care will be unaffordable for a huge share of the public. Giving them access to quality care means mobilizing government power to redistribute resources, either through direct tax and transfers or through regulations that raise costs for the healthy and lower them for the sick. Obamacare uses both methods, and both are utterly repugnant and unacceptable to movement conservatives. That commitment to abstract anti-government dogma, without any concern for the practical impact, is the quality that makes the Republican Party unlike right-of-center governing parties in any other democracy. In no other country would a conservative party develop a plan for health care that every major industry stakeholder calls completely unworkable."

At New York, Jonathan Chait asserts that "Trumpcare Collapsed Because the Republican Party Cannot Govern."

"There Is No Credible Explanation for Trump's Conduct That Is Compatible with the Idea That He Is Fit for High Office"

"Again: Let's say Trump knows he is guilty of nothing, and that the special prosecutor's investigation will inevitably exonerate him.

"Wouldn't that make this behavior just as—if not more—concerning?

"Either the president is acting erratically, due to a rational fear of what Mueller’s probe may reveal, or else he is suffering from an obsessive disorder that renders him helplessly self-destructive. Trump has stomped all over the naïveté defense. All that remains is the insanity plea. To plausibly deny that the president is a criminal, Republicans must stipulate that he's out of his mind."

Eric Levitz at New York argues that "If the President Is Innocent, Then He Is Insane."

"Speech Is Violence"?

"Setting aside the fact that no one will ever be able to agree on what’s 'abusive' versus what's 'merely offensive,' the articles Barrett links to are mostly about chronic stress—the stress elicited by, for example, spending one’s childhood in an impoverished environment of serious neglect and violence. Growing up in a dangerous neighborhood with a poor single mother who has to work so much she doesn’t have time to nurture you is not the same as being a college student at a campus where Yiannopoulos is coming to speak, and where you are free to ignore him or to protest his presence there. One situation involves a level of chronic stress that is inflicted on you against your will and which really could harm you in the long run; the other doesn't. Nowhere does Barrett fully explain how the presence on campus of a speaker like Yiannopoulos for a couple of hours is going to lead to students being afflicted with the sort of serious, chronic stress correlated with health difficulties. It's simply disingenuous to compare the two types of situations—in a way, it's an insult both to people who do deal with chronic stress and to student activists."

Jesse Singal at New York appeals to "Stop Telling Students Free Speech Is Traumatizing Them."

"Capitalist, as Distinguished from Socialist"

"And so the term neoliberal frames the political debate in a way that perfectly suits the messaging needs of left-wing critics of liberalism. The uselessness of 'neoliberalism' as an analytic tool is the very thing that makes it useful as a factional messaging device for the left. The 'neoliberalism' rubric implicates the Democratic Party in the rightward drift of American politics that has in reality been caused by the Republican Party's growing radicalism. It yokes the two parties together into a capitalist Establishment, against which socialism offers the only clear alternative. Obscuring the large gulf between Newt Gingrich and Bill Clinton, Paul Ryan and Barack Obama, is a feature of the term."

Jonathan Chait at New York criticizes the use of the term "neoliberalism."

"I Did Warn You Not To Get Me Started On The Shortcomings Of The 'Lego Indiana Jones' Games"

"This is what happens when you license the John Williams music and assume everything else will fall into place. Did the designers never play a good, puzzle-driven Indiana Jones game like Fate Of Atlantis or Infernal Machine? I daresay Raiders for the Atari 2600 or even Indiana Jones And His Desktop Adventures delivers more intellectual stimulus than your cherished Lego Indiana Jones, Adam."

From The Onion.

"Habitat For Humanity Investigated For Working Conditions After 92-Year-Old Laborer Collapses On Site"

"At press time, witnesses reported seeing the gaunt old man being forced onto a plane to go dig wells and lay pipe at a rural African project site just hours after being released from the hospital."

From The Onion.

"Why Does Trump Do This?"

"During the primaries, Ted Cruz actually tried to diagnose this Trump habit. 'This man is a pathological liar,' Cruz insisted. 'He lies practically every word that comes out of his mouth.' And in 'a pattern that I think is straight out of a psychology textbook, his response is to accuse everybody else of lying.”

Peter Beinart at The Atlantic calls Donald Trump "The Projection President."

"Fred Perry Forced to Denounce Skinheads"

"It started as an accident: Fred Perry launched around the height of mod fashion in England, and trendy youths latched onto the shirts as symbols of identification with the movement. Mods begat short-haired, working-class hard mods, which begat apolitical skinheads who chose Fred Perry shirts to match the colors of their favorite soccer teams. When a substantial segment of skinheads joined up with the far-right National Front party in the '70s, Fred Perry’s association with racist right-wing extremism was born."

Christina Cauterucci at Slate discusses Fred Perry in the age of Trump.

"Millions Of Policy Proposals Spill Into Sea As Brookings Institution Think Tanker Runs Aground Off Crimea Coast"

"Talbott went on to say that the Brookings Institution had already pledged $200 million toward cleanup efforts thanks to generous donations from the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation, the Hutchins Family Foundation, and the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation."

From The Onion.

"The Educated Class Have Created Barriers to Mobility"

"To feel at home in opportunity-rich areas, you've got to understand the right barre techniques, sport the right baby carrier, have the right podcast, food truck, tea, wine and Pilates tastes, not to mention possess the right attitudes about David Foster Wallace, child-rearing, gender norms and intersectionality.
"The educated class has built an ever more intricate net to cradle us in and ease everyone else out. It's not really the prices that ensure 80 percent of your co-shoppers at Whole Foods are, comfortingly, also college grads; it's the cultural codes."

David Brooks at The New York Times discusses Richard Reeves's Dream Hoarders and Elizabeth Currid-Halkett's The Sum of Small Things.

Osita Nwanevu at Slate responds to Brooks.

"The First Victim of American Imperialism"

"Many important figures of the epoch, with shame and regret, recognized its nature. That 'most outrageous war' (John Quincy Adams wrote) had been 'actuated by a spirit of rapacity and an inordinate desire for territorial aggrandizement' (Henry Clay), and began with a premeditated attack by President James Polk, thanks to which 'a band of murderers and demons from hell' were 'permitted to kill men, women and children' (Abraham Lincoln).

"After the naval bombardment of the civilian population of Veracruz, Robert E. Lee wrote to his wife, 'My heart bleeds for the inhabitants.' In his memoirs, Ulysses S. Grant lamented that he had not had "the moral courage to resign' from what, as a young officer, he had described as 'the most wicked war.' For a number of other politicians and thinkers, including Henry David Thoreau, the war contradicted the democratic and republican values on which the country had been founded and was opposed to basic Christian ethics."

Enrique Krauze at The New York Times writes about an effort to invalidate the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo.

Finis Germaniae?

"After World War II, the Allied occupiers, as Mr. Sieferle sees it, saddled Germans with a false idea of their own history—the idea that there was something premodern about Germany, a fundamental difference between it and the West. That may describe Russia, but not Germany, and Germany's modernity is painful for Westerners to face. 'If Germany belonged to the most progressive, civilized, cultivated countries,' he writes, 'then ‘Auschwitz’ means that, at any moment, the human "progress" of modernity can go into reverse.'"

Christopher Caldwell at The New York Times discusses German historian Rolf Peter Sieferle.

"Disgusting: ISIS Just Released A 2-Star Review Of 'In The Aeroplane Over The Sea'"

"We can only home that someone will soon put a stop to ISIS for good. Until then, only time will tell how far the terrorist group is willing to go."

From Clickhole.

The Cultural Logic of Trump

"The waves that carried a ridiculous TV celebrity to the presidency are being propelled by a deeper current of globalization: the triumph of the unreality industries, the move of manufacturing jobs out of the developed world, and the proliferation of technologies that saturate us with media.
"This analysis suggests that Trump is the product not just of a fluke election or a racist and sexist backlash, but the culmination of late capitalism. This has profound implications for how we see Trump—and how we oppose him. We have to focus less on Trump's personal flaws and more on the world that has enabled him. His habitual prevarications aren’t simply the result of his defective character, but an effective tactic. In a world where commerce and media (including social media) reward performance above truth telling, it's not surprising that a figure like Trump rises to the top. Any moralistic condemnation of Trump is incomplete without acknowledging the institutions (notably the media) that both created him and allowed him to thrive."

Jeet Heer at The New Republic calls Donald Trump "America's First Postmodern President."

"Takes on the Elements of the Standard Story One by One"

"Meanwhile, all the rewards for the prosecutor, at any level, are for making more prisoners. Since most prosecutors are elected, they might seem responsive to democratic discipline. In truth, they are so easily reëlected that a common path for a successful prosecutor is toward higher office. And the one thing that can cripple a prosecutor's political ascent is a reputation, even if based on only a single case, for being too lenient. In short, our system has huge incentives for brutality, and no incentives at all for mercy."

Adam Gopnik at The New Yorker reviews John F. Pfaff's Locked In: The True Causes of Mass Incarceration and How to Achieve Real Reform.

As does German Lopez at Vox.

"He's Speaking as the Head of a Tribe"

"Trump's sentence only makes sense as a statement of racial and religious paranoia. The 'south' and 'east' only threaten the West’s 'survival' if you see non-white, non-Christian immigrants as invaders. They only threaten the West’s 'survival' if by 'West' you mean white, Christian hegemony. A direct line connects Trump's assault on Barack Obama's citizenship to his speech in Poland. In Trump and Bannon's view, America is at its core Western: meaning white and Christian (or at least Judeo-Christian). The implication is that anyone in the United States who is not white and Christian may not truly be American but rather than an imposter and a threat."

Peter Beinart at The Atlantic criticizes Donald Trump's speech in Poland.

As does Jeet Heer at The New Republic.

As does David Frum at The Atlantic.

"A Left That Can Win"

"But like John Dewey, he rejects self-loathing as 'a luxury which agents––either individuals or nations––cannot afford,' and finds other aspects of American history and national character to celebrate. Today's Left would more effectively advance social justice if its adherents possessed a historical memory that extended farther back than the 1960s, he argued, to a movement more than a century old 'that has served human liberty well.' It would help, for example, 'if students became as familiar with the Pullman Strike, the Great Coalfield War, and the passage of the Wagner Act as with the march from Selma, Berkeley free-speech demonstrations, and Stonewall.'
"If more Leftists saw themselves as part of that history, with all its achievements, they might continue to lament that 'America is not a morally pure country,' but might better understand that 'no country ever has been or ever will be,' and that no country will ever have 'a morally pure, homogeneous Left' to bring about social justice."

Conor Friedersdorf at The Atlantic looks to Richard Rorty for guidance.

"Chilling the Impulse to Create Beautiful Things That Outlast Us"

"'Not only popular dress, hairstyle, and music but more recently literature and art are at the forefront of the debate,' Scafidi noted. We may not live to see an international bureaucracy organized and proactive enough to catalog every book and painting that outstretches its author's culture of origin. But there will be more complaints against painters, sculptors, literary writers and fewer freshman seminars assigning old novels that could now be deemed culturally appropriative, and fewer authors writing new ones."

Alice B. Lloyd at The Weekly Standard discusses the United Nations' Intergovernmental Committee on Intellectual Property and Genetic Resources, Traditional Knowledge and Folklore.

"Paved the Way for Every Ambitious Rock Record to Follow"

"As founding fathers of the '70s New York City underground rock scene, among the first bands who played CBGB, Television found themselves sticking out even among the out crowd. They soon distinguished themselves as the math nerds of punk, and every burgeoning genre needs a math nerd.

"They were the King Crimson to hard rock's Led Zeppelin, Funkadelic to soul's Otis Redding."

Ron Hart at the Observer marks the fortieth anniversary of Television's Marquee Moon.

Dead on the Fourth of July

"The importance of July 4 might have surprised some Founding Fathers. The Continental Congress declared freedom from Britain on July 2 and approved the Declaration of Independence on July 4. Most members signed the document in August.
"Adams thought Americans would remember July 2 as their 'Day of Deliverance' from Britain. In a letter to his wife, Abigail, he wrote, 'It ought to be solemnized with Pomp and Parade, with Shews, Games, Sports, Guns, Bells, Bonfires and Illuminations from one End of this Continent to the other from this Time forward forever more."

Melissa Etehad in the Los Angeles Times discusses the deaths of John Adams, Thomas Jefferson, and James Monroe.

"The Souring of American Exceptionalism"

"America's uniqueness, even pre-Trump, was expressed as much through negative indicators than positive. It is more violent than other comparable societies, both one-on-one and in the gun massacres to which the country has become so habituated. It has worse health outcomes than comparably wealthy countries, and some of them most important of them are deteriorating further even as they improve almost everywhere else. America's average levels of academic achievement lag those of other advanced countries. Fewer Americans vote—and in no other democracy does organized money count for so much in political life. A century ago, H.L. Mencken observed the American 'national genius for corruption,' and (again pre-Trump) Transparency International's corruption perceptions index ranks the U.S. in 18th place, behind Hong Kong, Belgium, Australia, Canada, the Netherlands, the United Kingdom, Germany—never mind first-place finishers Denmark and New Zealand.
"As I said: pre-Trump. Now the United States has elected a president who seems much more aligned with—and comfortable in the company of—the rulers of Turkey, Hungary, Uzbekistan, and the Philippines than his counterparts in other highly developed countries."

David Frum at The Atlantic takes stock of the United States upon its 241st birthday.

"Makes a Plausible Case for This Demise"

"'The age of the rock star ended with the passing of physical product, the rise of automated percussion, the domination of the committee approach to hit-making, the widespread adoption of choreography and, above all, the advent of the mystique-destroying internet,' he argues. 'The age of the rock star was coterminous with rock'n'roll, which, in spite of all the promises made in some memorable songs, proved to be as finite as the era of ragtime or big bands. The rock era is over. We now live in a hip-hop world.'"

David Kynaston  at The Guardian reviews David Hepworth's Uncommon People.

And Geoff Edgers in The Washington Post discusses the decline of the electric guitar.

"The Shift in Attitude Regarding College Has Also Become Commonly Accepted"

"In 1927, John D. Rockefeller began campaigning for charging students the full cost it took to educate them. Further, he suggested that students could shoulder such costs through student loans. Rockefeller and like-minded donors (in particular, William E. Harmon, the wealthy real estate magnate) were quite successful in their campaign. They convinced donors, educators and college administrators that students should pay for their own education because going to college was considered a deeply personal affair. Tuition–and student loans–thus became commonly accepted aspects of the economics of higher education."

At The Conversation, Thomas Adam argues that "tuition-free education can only be realized if college education is again reframed as a public good."