{"id":14531,"date":"2015-01-26T18:02:50","date_gmt":"2015-01-26T18:02:50","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/rafaelfajardo.com\/portfolio\/governor-a-reporter-asked-what-is-an\/"},"modified":"2015-01-26T18:02:50","modified_gmt":"2015-01-26T18:02:50","slug":"governor-a-reporter-asked-what-is-an","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/rafaelfajardo.com\/portfolio\/governor-a-reporter-asked-what-is-an\/","title":{"rendered":""},"content":{"rendered":"<blockquote>\n<p>&ldquo;Governor,&rdquo; a reporter asked, &ldquo;what is an intellectual luxury?&rdquo; <\/p>\n<p>Reagan described a four-credit course at the University of California at Davis on organizing demonstrations. &ldquo;I figure that carrying a picket sign is sort of like, oh, a lot of things you pick up naturally,&rdquo; he said, &ldquo;like learning how to swim by falling off the end of a dock.&rdquo; <\/p>\n<p>Whole academic programs in California and across the country he found similarly suspect. Taxpayers, he said, shouldn\u2019t be &ldquo;subsidizing intellectual curiosity.&rdquo; <\/p>\n<p>That phrase quickly brought Reagan scorn. The following week the <i>Los Angeles Times<\/i> editorial page warned that his budget cuts and &ldquo;tampering&rdquo; with higher education threatened to create second-rate institutions. <\/p>\n<p>&ldquo;If a university is not a place where intellectual curiosity is to be encouraged, and subsidized,&rdquo; the editors wrote, &ldquo;then it is nothing.&rdquo; <\/p>\n<p>The <i>Times<\/i> was giving voice to the ideal of liberal education, in which college is a vehicle for intellectual development, for cultivating a flexible mind, and, no matter the focus of study, for fostering a broad set of knowledge and skills whose value is not always immediately apparent. <\/p>\n<p>Reagan was staking out a competing vision. Learning for learning\u2019s sake might be nice, but the rest of us shouldn\u2019t have to pay for it. A higher education should prepare students for jobs. <\/p>\n<p>Those two theories had long existed in uneasy equilibrium. On that day in 1967, the balance started to tip toward utility in ways not even Reagan may have anticipated.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>&ldquo;Governor,&rdquo; a reporter asked, &ldquo;what is an intellectual luxury?&rdquo; Reagan described a four-credit course at the University of California at Davis on organizing demonstrations. &ldquo;I figure that carrying a picket sign is sort of like, oh, a lot of things you pick up naturally,&rdquo; he said, &ldquo;like learning how to swim by falling off the [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[10],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-14531","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-words"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p6PWot-3Mn","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/rafaelfajardo.com\/portfolio\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14531","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/rafaelfajardo.com\/portfolio\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/rafaelfajardo.com\/portfolio\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/rafaelfajardo.com\/portfolio\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/rafaelfajardo.com\/portfolio\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=14531"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/rafaelfajardo.com\/portfolio\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14531\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/rafaelfajardo.com\/portfolio\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=14531"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/rafaelfajardo.com\/portfolio\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=14531"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/rafaelfajardo.com\/portfolio\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=14531"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}