When Bernie Sanders brought his political revolution pep fest to Illinois last week, he took it to those esteemed bastions of higher education, the University of Chicago (his own alma mater) and Chicago State University.
Well, that, and the fact that Kanye West was once a student there.
On January 13, as a bill to restore MAP grants, a form of low-income student funding, was filed in the state senate, the governor’s office released a memo to legislators arguing that public universities need to make major financial reforms before the state gives them any more money. The memo, from deputy chief of staff Richard Goldberg, said these schools need to root out cronyism and cut wasteful spending on things like private jets and country-club memberships.
On January 19, the governor’s office issued another memo from Goldberg to the general assembly, this one consisting entirely of charges against CSU. The first was a stunner: a claim that the largely black university serves its white students much better than its students of color.
Calhoun also thought the governor should know that the incredibly low CSU four-year graduation rates cited by Goldberg (2 to 4 percent) are grossly misleading, drawn from a federal data system that fails to count (among others) the full-time and part-time transfer students who make up a majority of the CSU student body. In fact, in the cohort of students referenced by Goldberg, Calhoun wrote, “only 9% [of the CSU student body] would be counted.” The graduation rate for full-time transfer students in that cohort? Fifty-one percent.
But there’s a catch: even if passed, 6409 will go into effect only if another bill, one that allows the governor to take money out of various special state funds and never pay it back, also passes.
