China's domestic land grab

In China's Land Grabs Raise Specter of Popular Unrest, Edward Cody describes the struggle of peasants against officials who expropriate their land.

"The situation of peasants being deprived of their land is very serious in China," said Li Baiguang, director of the Beijing Qimin Research Center. Li, who has studied land seizures in Fujian and other rural provinces, added, "If the interests of the peasants cannot be properly protected and the conflicts cannot be settled, Chinese society might suffer from turbulence."

...a low-level Communist Party cadre caused a national sensation nearly two months ago by publishing an open letter accusing his superiors of blocking attempts to investigate similar land seizures in another suburb of Fuzhou. Within days, the letter was pulled from Web sites and the government-controlled press was ordered to stop reporting on it. The Fuzhou government said the official, Huang Jingao, had violated party rules. It ordered him to proceed with a self-examination of his errors, which a declaration said were caused by "individualism."

Individualism was a goal of the well-to-do professionals who, in the 1990s, built about 165 luxury houses on Xiao Guwei, an island in the Pearl River where it flows through booming Guangzhou 300 miles southwest of here. No two houses were the same, and most enjoyed serene views of the murky river that belied their nearness to the busy city center.

Cody earlier described Huang Jingao 黄金高's battle against corruption.

The Chinese version of the fruitcake

Chinese Commercialism Sends Mooncake Prices Into Orbit By Ralph Frammolino

Through advertising, slick packaging and a stunning array of new flavors, the traditional holiday dessert has been transformed into a modern-day status symbol.

And now the Chinese, to whom gift giving is a serious exercise in social etiquette, find themselves locked in a virtual mooncake arms race as they do their last-minute shopping for the pastries to give to friends, families and colleagues in time for tonight's annual moon festival dinner.

People are

cranking out mooncakes with increasingly exotic fillings — shark fin, mussels, crushed eggshells, salted beef soaked in liquor, abalone, even bits of swallows' nests.

There are sugar-free mooncakes, whole-grain mooncakes and Atkins diet mooncakes. There are Dove bar mooncakes and Haagen-Dazs mooncakes. For the metallurgically inclined, there's even the ornamental 9.5-gram mooncake made of gold, costing $225.

And that's only the half of it. Mooncakes now come packaged in individual boxes of carved jade or hand-polished wood. They are paired with expensive wines, fine porcelain tea sets, CDs — even cameras — in sets fetching as much as $1,210.

Yeah, I can live without the typical kind, but I have had some that weren't bad.

How to Help the Working Poor

David Warsh argues that solutions to help the working poor have little to do with the minimum wage. What is needed

is some combination of education and training reforms... [and] of various forms of financial support to individuals known as the "negative income tax" and exemplified by the child tax credit; and various subsidies to employers designed to increase the rewards to work -- the enhanced-wage jobs offered to scholarship students by universities being a case in point.

And he points out how the income threshold necessary to qualify for the child credit will climb from $10,000 to $11,000, putting out of the reach of many poor people.

A hero?

In Bullying Taiwan, Tim Lehmann critizes China's efforts to thwart Taiwan. He also points out how U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan bowed to a demand by China. Journalists had originally been scheduled to view--from inside the U.N. building--an address by Chen Shui-bian (via video-link from Taipei, because he's generally not allowed into the US). But without the consent of the head of the U.N. Correspondents Association, Annan forced them out of the building. Sure, the Chinese are being typically petty; this was after the Taiwanese bid to join the UN was rejected, at their behest. But Annan looks pretty bad, too.

It was curious that Chen should be singled out in not being allowed to speak at the UNCA. After all, the UNCA has traditionally been a "free speech zone," Jenkins pointed out to Annan, noting that the UNCA has in the past permitted a wide range of individuals and groups to speak on its premises, including a number of groups of dubious repute, such as the IRA, the Taliban, and the Iranian People's Mujahadeen.

Tim Lehmann also discusses a humiliation for Taiwan at the Paralympics:

Taiwan's first lady, Wu Shu-jen, arrived in Athens a week ago Sunday with the intention of leading Taiwan's delegation at the opening ceremonies of the 2004 Paralympic Games, a parallel event to the Olympics dedicated to athletes with disabilities. Wu, the emeritus president of the Chinese Taipei Paralympic Committee (CPTC), has been paralyzed from the waist down since 1985.

Once it became clear that Wu would lead Taiwan's athletes, China attempted to strong-arm the International Paralympic Committee (IPC) into revoking Wu's status as head of the "Chinese Taipei" (Taiwan's name at international events) team. China, which claims sovereignty over self-governing Taiwan, had averred that Wu's presence at the Paralympics would politicize the games.

Early in the week, the IPC bent to China's will and disqualified Wu from leading the team, stripping her of her National Paralympic Card on the ostensible grounds that she was not the official head of the CPTC. This decision, too, was taken at China's insistence, even though the IPC knew her status in August when it issued her the card. In response, Taiwan submitted an official protest to the IPC, pointing out that many of the other delegations to the games--including Australia, New Zealand, the United States, Japan, and Korea--were not headed by the presidents of their national paralympic committees.

My italics. So how does Lin Chieh-yu of the Taipei Times spin the humiliation? Huang returns a real hero

...one of the most famous heroes of Taiwan's delegation is not an athlete but the Deputy Secretary-General of the Presidential Office James Huang (黃志芳), who outmaneuvered China's diplomatic machinations and helped first lady Wu Shu-jen (吳淑珍) accomplish her trip to Athens.

Undiplomatic

Responding to criticism of Minister of Foreign Affairs Mark Chen's (陳唐山) blunt assessments of Singapore during his meeting with pro-independence activists on Monday, Ministry of Foreign Affairs (MOFA) spokesman Michel Lu (呂慶龍) yesterday said the foreign minister apologized for his inappropriate choice of words.

"I deeply apologize for the words I said which made others uncomfortable," Lu quoted Chen as saying.

In response to press queries on Chen's remarks, a spokesman for Singapore's Foreign Affairs Ministry said, "This is not the first time Singapore has stated our concerns about Taiwan. Many other countries also believe that Taiwan is pursuing a dangerous course towards independence. Resort[ing] to intemperate language cannot assuage these concerns."

Infuriated by his Singaporean counterpart George Yeo's criticism of Taiwan during the recent UN General Assembly, Chen called the city-state "a tiny nation no bigger than a piece of snot."

He also said, "Singapore holds China's lam pa (爛疤) with its hands, if I may use these ugly words."

In the Hoklo language, also known as Taiwanese, lam pa means testicles; saying that someone holds another's lam pa means that the former is fawning over the latter...

[A] KMT lawmaker, Bill Sun (孫國華), said that Chen's words were "a severe example of misspeaking in the international arena."

"In fact, Chen's comments were made to attract votes from the pro-independence camp," Sun said yesterday. "However, the nation's people will pay a considerable price for this eventually."

"Most of Taiwan's diplomatic allies are much smaller than Singapore. The ministry should immediately apologize for such inappropriate criticism," Sun said.

So much for Mark Chen being a stalwart Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) member.

My Kid Could Paint That

A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Girl By MICHELLE YORK

The hottest new abstract artist in town has reason to celebrate.

This summer, she went from selling her work in a coffee shop to having her own gallery show.

After a local newspaper's feature on her, about 2,000 people came for opening night - everyone from serious collectors to the artist's preschool teacher. She earned more money than she could comprehend. The gallery owner said it was his most successful show ever and scheduled a second one for October.

So celebrate, the artist did. During a recent visit, she climbed on a big bouncing ball shaped like a frog, grabbed the handles and bounced around the house with laughter pealing and pigtails flying.

The artist is Marla Olmstead. She is 4.

Poor abstract artists like Mark Wolak! This is what they have to compete with! There were already elephant abstract painters.

It looked like snot

Swimming in syrup is as easy as water by Michael Hopkin:

It's a question that has taxed generations of the finest minds in physics: do humans swim slower in syrup than in water? And since you ask, the answer's no. Scientists have filled a swimming pool with a syrupy mixture and proved it.

"What appealed was the bizarreness of the idea," says Edward Cussler of the University of Minnesota, Minneapolis, who led the experiment...

while you experience more "viscous drag" (basically friction from your movement through the fluid) as the water gets thicker, you generate more forwards force from every stroke. The two effects cancel each other out.

via geekpress.

I'm OK, you're not

Professor Bainbridge quotes an email from Eric Muller:

The reluctance of bloggers to note the blogospheric take-down of Malkin's work while allowing her to join the post-Rather blogospheric self-congratulation is a story on its own, and you don't need to be an internment expert to see it. For more on this, see [this post]. And in the meantime, the call for Arab internment now spreads upward into the pages of US News & World Report.

Too right. Last night NBC noted the role of the bloggers in exposing Rather's fraud and also mentioned their role in Trent Lott's takedown (check out my search: bloggers "senate majority leader" hairpiece), but nothing on Malkin.

Death rates among the elite are rising

China Study: City Dwellers in Poor Health By ELAINE KURTENBACH

Up to 75 percent of all urban Chinese suffer from ill health, and life expectancies are declining for skilled and educated workers as modern lifestyles exact a deadly toll, according to a study by the Chinese Red Cross.

The survey of 16 Chinese cities with more than 1 million people found that 75 percent of Beijing residents were in poor health, along with 73 percent of those in Shanghai and the southern city of Guangzhou, the state-run newspaper Shanghai Daily reported Monday.

The findings illustrate a darker side of China's economic success story: deteriorating public health and a decline in well-being for many Chinese, even in the country's richest cities.

The Red Cross study defined poor health or "sub health" as illness causing reduced levels of energy and fitness but with no specific diagnosis of a disease...

The Chinese Academy of Sciences reports that the average life span of an educated person is 58, more than 10 years lower than the national average of 72 years.

A separate study found that among the 380,000 information technology professionals working in Zhongguancun, Beijing's equivalent of Silicon Valley, the average life expectancy was only 53 years - five years lower than a decade ago, the official Xinhua News Agency reported Monday...

Urban Chinese are getting gaining weight as they switch from diets heavy in vegetables and staple grains to much higher consumption of fats, meats and sugar. Physical labor has given way to more sedentary work, and stress levels are rising as workers lose cradle-to-grave employment and struggle to make ends meet in a competitive job market.

Meanwhile, China's industrial boom and soaring number of vehicles have spoiled water and air to the point where its cities are among the worst polluted in the world, and respiratory diseases are the No. 1 cause of early death.

Although Shanghai has claimed progress in cleaning up its notoriously noxious Suzhou Creek, upstream canals remain heavily polluted. Most waterways are unsafe for drinking, and some are not fit even for agricultural use.

The population of cities is also aging quickly, raising the percentage of people more likely to be suffering from chronic diseases such as diabetes and heart problems...

The government once touted the country's broad provision of basic services, such as medical care and education, as obvious benefits of Communist Party rule. But for many, those services have been dismantled.

Farm families in the countryside can no longer count on "barefoot
doctors" for basic health services. And although city dwellers have
access to the country's best medical facilities, the lack of a
comprehensive health insurance system means that many cannot afford
medical care.

I'm skeptical that rural people are quite as healthy as this article suggests. With virtually no insurance, are they really that much healthier than urbanites? Still, it's ironic that the elite is so unhealthy.

Asian parents

I heard the moderator on the Justice Talking program about school desegregation ask something about how Asian parents pushed their kids to study hard, but I missed it if either speaker felt that had anything to do with the education of black or hispanic students. In other words, people don't feel it's the parents' job to push their children to study. Unbelievable.

Litchi

In China, Farmers' Labor Bears Too Much Fruit By KEITH BRADSHER

As in many industries, from television sets to washing machines and now to cars, early success by a few producers led to a flood of investment, overproduction and the evaporation of profits.

While business success often draws new competitors in Western countries, the effect is outsize in China.

Each state-owned bank branch tends to funnel huge loans at very low interest rates to investors in any industry that seems profitable, almost regardless of whether other lenders are doing the same, bankers said. And with a long tradition of news media censorship and a distrust of official pronouncements, business executives and peasants alike tend to barrel ahead, leery of believing admonitions against over-investment - until prices plunge.

Among litchi producers, the problem was not so much loans, though these played a role, but rather a kind of folk wisdom that litchi trees would always be a good investment for families' savings...

After three years, the trees were three feet tall and producing five or six pounds of fruit apiece. After six years, the trees are expected to be double that height and would yield 35 pounds of fruit apiece if all the litchi were allowed to mature, Mr. Zhao said.

In another decade, his trees will be fully grown, more than 10 feet tall and each producing up to 170 pounds of litchis, swelling the oversupply.

The Chinese government has banned the planting of any more litchi trees, and banks have stopped lending to litchi farms. But the current glut is not only going to grow worse as more trees mature, but is also likely to last a long time.

Once a tree reaches full size, it can continue producing litchis for centuries, although the poundage does decrease somewhat with age. Detailed production records show that a few litchi trees in western Guangdong Province are 1,200 years old, and they are still bearing fruit, [according to a professor of horticulture]...

A lack of a futures markets for commodities in China has made it hard for farmers to foresee the long-term direction of prices. Some litchi growers associations now allow the trading of rights to future deliveries, but only up to six months ahead, and the availability of these trading rights comes too late to stop the soaring output now.

Fresh litchis are something of an acquired taste in any case, as they are time-consuming to peel for the modest fruit they contain, especially in the case of heiye litchis. [hence the name black leaf litchis; they bear fruit with a blackish-red peel, and the seed is so large that there is little flesh. The meager flesh is watery and nearly transparent, and has a weak flavor.]

Yet the litchi, long a symbol of China, is in danger of becoming passé in its home country. A canned litchi-flavored drink sold across the nation for many years has been losing sales lately, as young people choose newer and more fashionable drinks, like Coca-Cola.

An acquired taste? That means he doesn't like them. And as for cola, I suspect that's a temporary phenomenon exacerbated by the lack of marketing know-how. In Japan and Taiwan, it hardly has the market for drinks cornered. Anyway, what he means by a symbol of China may have something to do with the Emperor's concubine Yang Guifei 杨贵妃 (719-756) and her legendary fondess for litchi 荔枝 from Lingnan 岭南.

No worries about sounding middle of the road

Yesterday on NPR the teaser sounded something like "Dead on the Campaign Trail". The segment was Before Bush Speaks, Partisans Preach to Faithful and the summary goes:

When President Bush makes a campaign appearance, neither he nor his media entourage arrive in time to hear the opening act. But those who do hear speakers and entertainers with a strong point of view and no worries about sounding middle of the road. NPR's Don Gonyea reports.

It's certainly not the kind of stuff I support, but there was no word on whether Kerry does the same thing.

Update
On the other hand, there was the first segment (by Melissa Block) of a series on gross anatomy and body donation. Speaking of organs...

Organ concert

It was the annual organ concert (free because of the endowment by Marianne Webb and David Bateman). Last night it was Peter Conte. It was better than I expected, given that he was promoted as the organist of the Wanamaker Organ in a Philadelphia department store now owned by Lord & Taylor. He claimed that that is the largest pipe organ in the world, and explained that originally the boss of Wanamaker was a music lover, so I guess it's not as strange as it sounds. He was also promoted as a transcriptor, and for some reason I've got a prejudice against those, even though last year's was OK. He did a good job with those. However, it wasn't as exciting as last year's, speaking of which it also included Guilmant & Vierne.

• Grand Choeur in D (alla Handel) (Alexandre Guilmant)--light but engaging



• Concert variations on The Last Rose of Summer (Dudley Buck)--not bad



• Pieces de Fantasie; Dedicace & Tocatta (Vierne)--the first was awfully gloomy and meandering, but the Tocatta was nice



• Concerto in G Major (Johann Ernst, transcribed by Bach)



• Variations on a Theme by Haydn (Brahms, transcribed by Conte)--not bad



• A silly improvisation. I think he was tired.

How dreadfully bourgeois once again!

Update
I didn't mention one peculiarlity: we were not allowed to sit in the balcony rows nearer the organist, supposedly at his request, but people who arrived just before the concert started were. Worse, one young man was allowed to enter shortly after the concert started; a few minutes after the intermission was over he came in again after the organist had started playing and then left before he had finished.

There were a couple of other annoyances: the man in front of us who kept his keys on a clip on his belt, permitting them to clash against the metal seats twice; and the woman behind us who not only failed to turn off her cell phone before it started ringing, but also had to whisper to her companion.

Money, money, money

In Lewis Lapham Phones It In: Figuring out what's wrong with Harper's magazine by Jack Shafer, the most interesting part to me was not the Lapham stuff, but the money talk:

[Democratic Party operative Rob Stein] and Lapham would have you believe that conservative foundations both outweigh liberal foundations and suppress the liberal message with their big spending. But that's not the case. Stein estimates assets of $2 billion for the eight major conservative family foundations in 2001, which sounds gargantuan. But that's chump change compared to the holdings of liberal foundations. Writing in the American Prospect in 1998, Karen Paget notes that none of these conservative foundations rank in the top 10 American foundations measured by assets, and most don't even break into the top 50.

What sort of media do liberal foundations fund? The liberal John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, which reported assets of $4.2 billion in 2003, made grants of $7.5 million to various liberal media projects, including Public Radio International ($2.5 million), WNET documentary films ($800,000), WGBH documentary film ($400,000), and other TV, documentary, and radio initiatives, according to the foundation's annual report.

The Schumann Center for Media and Democracy (assets of $60 million in 2002) gave money to liberal media organizations in 2003 at rates that would make a Scaife faint. The group's federal Form 990 records it giving $4.3 million away to TomPaine.com/the Florence Fund ($2 million), Sojourners magazine ($500,000), an investigative fund for Salon.com ($277,785), the Nation Institute ($115,000), and various radio, film, and magazine projects (the Washington Monthly and the American Prospect got piddly amounts). It also paid Bill Moyers, host of PBS's Now, $200,000 to serve as its president.

Paget argues persuasively that conservative foundations are more effective than liberal foundations because they're better at giving money away, not because they give more of it away. Conservatives tend to 1) give general support, letting the grantee decide how to spend the money; and 2) they tend to renew those gifts year after year, letting the grantee take root as an institution and freeing it from running in circles on the fund-raising wheel. Conservative magazines such as Commentary, the American Spectator, the National Interest, the Public Interest, the New Criterion, and Policy Review have flourished because of steady funding by benefactors.

Liberal foundations, on the other hand, tend to limit their donations to specific projects and don't make multiple deposits over the years. In other words, a liberal propaganda mill exists; it just operates under different philanthropic principles than the conservative one.

Still, the "persuasive" claim here is that conservative foundations are more effective. I still think the media has a slight liberal tilt. Do they cancel each other out? (via Nick Gillespie)

I'm a minority, too!

Speaking out in favor of immigration in Go Ahead, Leave the Door Open, Brian Doherty mentions a

Samuel Huntington-style concern for "cultural integrity" and "national identity," the protection of which is not among the granted powers in the Constitution, as near as I can tell.

In his article, Huntington claims "America is becoming a dangerously Balkanized country." This is the other side of identity politics. The more one insists on one's cultural identity, which is usually minority and in contrast to a perceived majority, the more the majority is going to feel threatened, and react with this kind of idiocy. I say this as one of the intelligent minority (oops...).

Eat Your Vegetables

Don't Play a Numbers Game, Experts Say, Just Eat Your Vegetables By MARY DUENWALD

...the gathering evidence in support of low-glycemic index eating has lent new validity to a bit of age-old nutritional wisdom: a healthy diet includes plenty of vegetables, fruits, legumes, whole grains and nuts, and relatively few sugary foods and drinks and refined starches.

...for the average person wishing to eat a lower index diet, it is best to ignore the index numbers and simply aim to eat less refined starches. "Just eat abundant quantities of fruits, vegetables, legumes and nuts, and reduce your consumption of white bread, prepared breakfast cereals, white rice and potato products...

Danish researchers who tried to predict the glycemic index of entire breakfasts based on the glycemic index values of the carbohydrates in them were unsuccessful. The only way to predict the glycemic response prompted by the various breakfasts was to consider the total calories.

Don't forget to exercise.

Euthanasia, anyone?

Alzheimer's in the Living Room: How One Family Rallies to Cope By JANE GROSS says,

a substantial majority of Alzheimer's patients are cared for at home by family members; estimates range from two-thirds to 95 percent. This growing army of caregivers props up the nation's health care system with free labor, worth, economists and researchers say, more than $100 billion a year, or more than twice the cost of nursing home and paid home care combined.

But these largely invisible caregivers, who buttress the nation's health care system, pay a terrible price. The architecture of the family is turned upside down, turning children into parents and parents into children. Emotional bonds and financial resources are strained, even in the most resilient households. Caregivers get sick from the stress.

But the rest of the article is about a single family's problems, and I didn't notice any tips on how to vote in their stead.

Snooty is as snooty does

In I'm Cooking as Fast as I Can By WILLIAM GRIMES, he states that his goal is "putting a respectable meal on the table in 30 minutes or less". He admits,

is worth stating at the outset that there is good fast food and bad fast food, and speed has nothing to do with the difference between the two. Canned onion rings over canned green beans, a casserole dish I recall from childhood, may be the bad fast dish par excellence. At the opposite end of the scale I might place veal chops in sage-butter sauce spiked with a little vermouth, a simple Italian entree I have made many times. Both dishes take about 10 minutes to prepare. One is satisfying and delicious. The other is a crime against nature. No one should ever dine at a quality level lower than veal in sage-butter sauce. At least not at my house.

I am happy to report that Betty Crocker does not call for canned onion rings in her "Quick and Easy Cookbook," but the recipes do cater to a middlebrow concept of fine cooking that leaves me cold. Betty takes a nonjudgmental attitude toward margarine versus butter. Frozen or canned ingredients she accepts as a fact of life and frozen fish, too. If you don't want to mince garlic, it is O.K. to buy it minced in a bottle.

Betty has a new look and a new hairdo. She knows about couscous, chipotles and salsa. But her heart belongs to the 1950's. How else to explain dishes like cheesy tuna broccoli skillet casserole or maple-mustard syrup as a sauce for asparagus? The recipes have a train-wreck fascination to them, and some of the photographs seem almost forensic. Fudge pudding cake, for example, looks like a heaping helping of Alpo.

All very amusing, no doubt. But the Chinese meals my wife prepares often take an hour or more to prepare. Sometimes there's a price to pay for eating something good. Why must he sneer at people who are willing to sacrifice time to taste? I guess it makes him feel better about himself. (That's why I'm sneering at him, of course.)

Truth not allowed in China

China has internet blacklist By Richard Spencer

Chinese computer hackers have discovered a list of officially banned words and topics, casting new light on the shadowy world of the country's 30,000 internet police...

Some topics were predictable: human rights, democracy and phrases used to describe the Tiananmen Square massacre.

But others showed the full sensitivity of the authorities, The list included the name of President Hu Jintao and the words liberty, Christian, truth, sex and brassiere.

Here's a similar list: Hu Jintao 胡锦涛、democracy 民主、liberty 自由、Christian 基督教、truth 真理、sex 性、brassiere 奶罩、June 4th 六四、human rights 人权、and Jiang Zemin's personal favorite, Falungong 法轮功。

I suppose the 性 that's disallowed is 性 as a single word, for as Lin Yutang's dictionary points out, 性 is

1. the equivalent of -ness, -ity for expressing abstract notions: 可能性 possibility, from 可能 possible, etc.
   
2. Nature, inborn nature: 天命之謂性，率性之謂道，修道之謂教 (中庸) "What is God-given is called nature; to follow that nature is called the way; to cultivate the way is called culture",
   
3. What is instinctive, inherent...天性，本性 man's inborn nature, also original nature of man.
   
4. Sex, sexual desire or impulse: 兩性 the two sexes
   
5. Gender: 陰性，陽性，中性 feminine, masculine, neuter gender
   
6. Personal temperament, character, personality: 性情
   

It's not until (4) that we get to sex.

No tenure???

The National Center for Public Policy and Higher Education has an interesting new report: Measuring Up 2004: The National Report Card on Higher Education. Their analysis concludes bleakly that

There have been real but modest gains in rates of associate and baccalaureate degree completion, but participation in college and completion of degrees remain among the weakest aspects of performance. In addition, far too many students still do not graduate from high school on time or at all. Without a high school diploma, most of these young people will face sadly diminished prospects of getting additional training or of ever finding employment that will support a middle-class standard of living. Communities and the nation lose as well, for having a pool of educated workers is the greatest asset in today's knowledge-based global economy.

Pervasively dismal grades in affordability show that for most American families college is less affordable now than it was a decade ago. The rising cost of attending college has outpaced the growth in family income. Although financial aid has increased, it has not kept pace with the cost of attendance. Every state should reexamine college tuition and financial aid policies, and each should formally link future tuition increases to gains in family income. In the meantime, the conclusion from Measuring Up 2004 is clear: The vast majority of states have failed to keep college affordable for most families.

I feel that tuition is going up too fast, but what's the solution? I can't say how to make people finish high school. As for holding down tuition, John M. McCardell Jr., president emeritus of Middlebury College, wrote that tenure is an outmoded concept:

tenure is a great solution to the problems of the 1940's, when the faculty was mostly male and academic freedom was at genuine risk. Why must institutions make a judgment that has lifetime consequences after a mere six or seven years? Publication may take longer in some fields than in others, and familial obligations frequently interrupt careers. Why not a system of contracts of varying length, including lifetime for the most valuable colleagues, that acknowledges the realities of academic life in the 21st century?

Moreover, when most tenure documents were originally adopted, faculty members had little protection. Today, almost every negative tenure decision is appealed. Appeals not upheld internally are taken to court. Few if any of these appeals have as their basis a denial of academic freedom.

I've got to say if I hadn't had the prize of tenure, I wouldn't have spent all that time and money getting a PhD.