Can You Afford To Go To College?

By Jesús Manuel Mena Garza

Today, after listening to several conservative politicians complain about colleges, I learned that they want to change the way they are run. They blast that colleges need to be more cost effective (not necessarily affordable) and of course less liberal.

Here are the facts. It costs more today to go to college than just a decade ago. Students are now incurring tremendous debt to attend school. Full-time professors are being replaced by adjuncts. Colleges want to attract more foreign students because they pay higher tuitions and fees.

During the heated conservative discussion, they complained that colleges force students to take classes that are not going to them land a job (aka: Ethnic Studies, Philosophy, Art, Art History, Poetry, etc.) These politicians desperately want to micromanage colleges, eliminating courses that don’t meet their conservative agenda.

The panel felt colleges were liberal bastions that spread propaganda promoting Marx, Castro and Obama. They wanted to give the boot to liberal professors and ethnic studies. Yes, they have a very-long list of classes they would like to excise. Maybe your favorite college subject is on their list?

These right-wing politicians also advocate long-distance learning as a way to save money. They proclaim that Internet courses are the wave of the future and that this new student body would be international. Again, it would be more profitable.

Some Historical Context

Those of you under forty probably don't know this, but California back in the 1960s and 70s had what was once considered the finest public university system in the world. It was also affordable. Back in the good old' days, when I went to college, I paid less than $100 a semester to attend San Jose State University. Now, a quality education is exponentially more expensive. What used to be the best university system is now just average. Despite all the fiscal attacks several of the UC's still compete at a high level despite their shrinking budgets.

With less money, colleges have had to make drastic cuts. Today, universities are scrambling to find new sources of funding (like the aforementioned foreign students). Many Californians who want to go to college can’t because they can’t afford it. In the end, maybe only the rich from America and abroad will be able to go to school. Once these select few are accepted, they may find themselves in over-crowded classrooms or staring at a lonely computer screen from home. At least that is the plan if many conservative politicians had their way. What do you think?

Bonus article: Harvard Cheaper than Cal State!

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MOMA: Diego Rivera Murals

Inspect Diego Rivera murals up close. Click here!

In December 1931, The Museum of Modern Art mounted a major exhibition of work by the Mexican artist Diego Rivera. It was only the second retrospective at the Museum, and it was wildly popular, breaking attendance records in its five-week run.

Diego Rivera at work

Rivera was already an international celebrity. He was the most visible figure in Mexican muralism, a large-scale public-art initiative that emerged in the 1920s in the wake of the Mexican Revolution. But his murals—by definition fixed on a single site—were impossible to transport for exhibition. 

To solve this problem, the Museum brought Rivera to New York six weeks before the show opened and provided him with a makeshift studio in an empty gallery. There, Rivera produced five "portable murals"—freestanding frescoes commemorating events in Mexican history—which were prominently featured in the show. 

After the opening, to great publicity, Rivera made three more murals, taking on contemporary New York subjects through monumental images of the city during the Great Depression. The story of this extraordinary commission elucidates Rivera's pivotal role in shaping debates about the social and political value of public art during a period of economic crisis.

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Chicano studies prof wins National Humanities Medal

Ramon Saldivar and President Obama

By Elaine Ayala for My San Antonio [Click header to go to original article and additional information.]



Stanford professor and Brownsville native Ramón Saldívar was among the nine winners of the National Humanities Medal last week. It’s an award given to “individuals or groups whose work has deepened the nation’s understanding of the humanities, broadened our citizens’ engagement with the humanities, or helped preserve and expand Americans’ access to important resources in the humanities.”


The selection of a Chicano studies scholar is timely, as Chicano and Mexican American studies are under attack in Arizona and as anti-immigrant, anti-Latino tones continue to be struck across the country. Saldívar’s scholarship is around globalization, transnationalism and Chicano studies.


President Obama called his exploration of identity along the border “bold.”


“In his studies of Chicano literature and the development of the novel in Europe and America, Dr. Saldívar highlights the cultural and literary markings that divide and unite us,” the president said.


The director of Stanford University’s Center for Comparative Studies in Race and Ethnicity, Saldívar is a graduate of the University of Texas at Austin. He earned his master and doctorate degrees in comparative literature from Yale University. For Brownsville natives it’s probably just as important that he’s a graduate of Brownsville High School.


He’s the author of “The Borderlands of Culture: Américo Paredes and the Transnational Imaginary,” “Chicano Narrative: The Dialectics of Difference” and “Figural Language in the Novel: The Flowers of Speech from Cervantes to Joyce. He’s at work on a fourth book about the perspectives of ethnic writers born after the civil rights era.


In a piece on the National Endowment for the Humanities web site, he said:


“From downtown Brownsville, you can literally look across the river and, a hundred yards away or so, there’s Mexico. To me, growing up, that was always normal life, that was the way the world worked: bilingual, bi-national, transcultural in all sorts of ways.”


Saldívar comes of a large family that birthed two other scholars. One is San Antonio resident Sonia Saldívar Hull, a professor of English and American literature at the University of Texas at San Antonio. She’s director of the Women’s Studies Department at UTSA. Another sibling, José Saldívar, is professor of comparative literature at Stanford.


One other Latino scholar received the medal this year. Professor Teofilo Ruiz teaches at UCLA.


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