问答题
.Tax universities? The unthinkable is now a live possibility. Congressional plans to tax the endowments of wealthy private schools and the tuition benefits of graduate students have elicited outrage from universities. Missing in this outcry is a recognition of the long history of reciprocity between academia and government that has incalculably benefited society. The nation's founders nourished great aspirations for higher learning. John Adams and Thomas Jefferson were so desperate to do this that they considered transplanting Switzerland's Genevan Academy wholesale to the nascent United States.
The economic and military demands of the Civil War presented the conditions for us to establish versions of a European-style university in America. To fund them, universities were granted federal money and exemption in exchange for providing a service to society. The Morrill Act of 1862 charged the land-grant universities to "promote the liberal and practical education of the industrial classes." The nationwide introduction of tax exemption for universities in the tax code formalized this reciprocity. The sad irony is that latter-day counterparts now seek to dismantle them.
The deal between universities and government now on the table was negotiated in the years after World War Ⅱ, when American pride in military victory commingled with anxiety over how to manage the stateside return of millions of soldiers. The result was the populary known G. I. Bill, which would eventually send more than two million veterans to college. In a generation, college access was transformed from an option only for the affluent students into a broadly accessible avenue of social mobility.
The ensuing Cold War further expanded the government-university joint venture. The Soviet launch of Sputnik in 1957 precipitated a rich flow of defense-related federal money to academic scientists. Stanford University was an eager recipient of the government patronage that seeded the blossoming of Silicon Valley. This Cold War deal brought controversy. The antiwar movement raged across the bay at the University of California and other powerhouses of government-funded science.
In the 1980s, tuition began its still unabated rise as administrators sought to replace declining state support. The cost of four-year degrees had grown so much that many families mortgaged their own financial futures to secure college degrees for their children. When student loan debt eclipsed the total amount that Americans owed on their credit cards in 2010, a rebellion against fancy academics was well underway. Institutions then came to seem overstuffed and defensive—they enjoyed generous tax breaks yet crankily rebuffed calls for cost containment. This is the historical context in which Congress is summoning universities back to the bargaining table.
We need to start asking which public goods universities are producing and whether government support gets Americans more of them. Taxing graduate students is a crude mechanism for extracting goods from academia. The current plan for taxing endowments does not address the problems that rightly drive citizen fury: soaring costs, educational inequality and schools' resistance to change. To address these issues, universities must bring new proposals to the table. They might commit to provide opportunities for people who would never otherwise attend college. Elite schools could forgo their current business model. They might instead create new forms of instructional opportunity that are within reach of people regardless of age or life circumstances.
Schools should experiment with this. At a minimum, evening, weekend and online courses should take their place in the strategic planning of every selective residential program. To pay for the new ventures, universities would persuade their patrons to invest in the futures of all Americans rather than the privileged few. And the Labor and Education Departments could create competitive grants encouraging universities to deliver training programs to populations and regions hardest hit by the economic tumult brought about by globalization and technological change. These proposals may sound radical, but history shows that universities flourish when they work with government to bring tangible value to the entire society. As academics, it's our turn to make an offer.