5: The New Culture Wars: Higher Ed Edition

The novelists V.V. Ganeshananthan and Whitney Terrell discuss how cuts to higher education are threatening the fabric of American life. Guests John Freeman and Sarah Smarsh talk about the higher cost of college has exacerbated income inequality. And the director of the Iowa Writers' Workshop, Lan Samantha Chang, weighs in on how the great Midwestern public universities are being squeezed by Republican-led state legislatures. Readings: "We Just Don't Feel Like We Belong Here Anymore" by Becca Andrews in Mother Jones. "The Decline of the Midwest's Public Universities Threatens to Wreck Its Most Vibrant Economies" by Jon Marcus in The Atlantic. "Elitists, crybabies and junky degrees" by Kevin Sullivan and Mary Jordan in the Washington Post. Tales of Two Americas, essays "Blood Brother" by Sarah Smarsh, "Hurray for Losers" by Dagoberto Gilb and "A Good Neighbor Is Hard To Find" by Whitney Terrell Moo by Jane Smiley Stoner by John Williams All is Forgotten, Nothing is Lost by Lan Samantha Chang Whitney's statistics on the 2008-2016 decline in Missouri's higher education funding come from an August 18, 2016 report from the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities. You can find the figures for your state here: https://www.cbpp.org/research/state-by-state-fact-sheets-higher-education-cuts-jeopardize-students-and-states-economic For more, visit us at LitHub.com

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