For the majority of us seeking degrees, higher education is indeed dying a slow and painful death. Too little considered, however, is the role we as students are playing in its demise. The combination of tuition hikes, a lack of democratic governance in our schools, ballooning student debt, and the intimate relationship between our financial institutions and our academic ones are certainly killing higher education – but what is killing the student movement is our own complacency with these policies. While here in America, students on many campuses have limited themselves to mourning, elsewhere in the world they have taken to the streets – and there is much we can learn from their activism, in order to better our own.

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There is a lecturer in my faculty whom I find devastatingly attractive. I find him so attractive that I have to actively control myself in his presence. I think about him nonstop. I am a graduate student and he is a lecturer. He is probably about double my age, and I am 22. I took one of his classes a few semesters back but won't be in any of his classes in the future.

I am sure I have made my attraction as painfully obvious as possible. Should I try to proposition him? What do you think of this sort of age gap? And how do I handle the possible (probable) rejection? I am aware of the imbalances of power, experience and maturity, as well as the conflicts of interest and possible repercussions that may ensue.

Unsure

Dear Unsure,

You may have thought and read about conflicts of interest and imbalances of power but are you ready to find, in the agonizing grip of an affair, a visceral unhappiness unlike anything you have ever known? Can you handle wanting to scream or grab a crowbar while also wanting to weep and beg forgiveness?

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"When I approached professors to discuss research projects addressing organic agriculture in farmer's markets, the first one told me that 'no one cares about people selling food in parking lots on the other side of the train tracks,’” said a PhD student at a large land-grant university who did not wish to be identified. “My academic adviser told me my best bet was to write a grant for Monsanto or the Department of Homeland Security to fund my research on why farmer's markets were stocked with 'black market vegetables' that 'are a bioterrorism threat waiting to happen.' It was communicated to me on more than one occasion throughout my education that I should just study something Monsanto would fund rather than ideas to which I was deeply committed. I ended up studying what I wanted, but received no financial support, and paid for my education out of pocket."

Unfortunately, she's not alone. Conducting research requires funding, and today's research follows the golden rule: The one with the gold makes the rules.

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The officials may have been indulging in some good old-fashioned political grandstanding, hoping to whip up support for a November vote on a tax hike endorsed by Gov. Jerry Brown. But in a state where tuition fees have already doubled in just five years, another 6 percent hike is hardly unthinkable. And as a symbol of rising costs in higher education nationwide, California's example is more than apt. Since 2001, tuition fees at four-year public colleges in the United States have risen at an annual average of 5.6 percent.

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In less than two hours I will be 19 and I am not sure what to do. I actually just Googled "I am not ready to be 19 what should I do," and your site came up, and I am relieved it did. I am a freshman in college and I am not happy. I really try to be, but it is difficult. It pretty much all started last year when I was applying for college. I had great grades, pretty good essays and a solid ACT score, but I did not get into any of my top choices, and it was devastating. And things just got worse from there. My aunt and uncle, whom I have always been really close to, turned on me, or least that's how it felt. They wanted me to go to a huge state school close to home that my uncle went to, but I ended up choosing a smaller private school over 800 miles away. My mom and grandma, who both raised me since my parents divorced when I was 2 and I have not seen my dad since, supported my decision.

After this, nothing was the same. My aunt was very cold to me and even rude. I wanted to yell at her, "What are you doing, don't you love me anymore?! I'm doing what I think is best for me!" But nothing happened. (I think there might be more to the sudden change in how she treats me but I do not know for sure.) This family chaos has really affected me because we were all so close. Being a member of a small family I loved our Sunday night dinners and conversations.

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I'm a freshman in college, I just turned 19, and I've never been kissed or even had a serious boyfriend. I was totally fine with this in high school -- I went to a very small school  and so the guys in my grade felt too much like brothers to go out with. In ninth grade, I went out on a few dates with a junior, but I was shy and he was much more experienced and we stopped dating a little awkwardly. The next year, we randomly ended up interning at the same company and I started to like him a lot, but he was leaving for college and he didn't seem interested. Junior year, I found out that he was, and we reconnected briefly over winter break but decided not to date long-distance. There were other guy friends of mine who expressed interest, but I didn't connect in that way with any of them. There weren't significant relationships by any means but there was enough of that teenage intrigue to occupy my time and make me feel wanted. I had my own crushes. I was on student council and the honor roll and I had an inseparable best friend and a great group of larger friends. I'm very close with my family. Sometimes I felt impatient and wondered when I would meet a guy that things might stick with, but overall I was happy. I've always been confident in my looks - I love clothes and makeup. I'm an athlete. I even did a little modeling in high school. I always was fine with waiting and trusted that good things would happen in college.

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Since 9/11, the homeland security state has come to campus just as it has come to America’s towns and cities, its places of work and its houses of worship, its public space and its cyberspace. But the age of (in)security had announced its arrival on campus with considerably less fanfare than elsewhere -- until, that is, the “less lethal” weapons were unleashed in the fall of 2011.

Today, from the City University of New York to the University of California, students increasingly find themselves on the frontlines, not of a war on terror, but of a war on “radicalism” and “extremism.” Just about everyone from college administrators and educators to law enforcement personnel and corporate executives seems to have enlisted in this war effort.  Increasingly, American students are in their sights.

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Will Bunch highlighted the... slightly dubious claim, as reported by a Detroit CBS affiliate (emphasis Bunch's):

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Santorum needn’t worry. America is already making it harder for young people of modest means to attend college. Public higher education is being starved, and the middle class will shrink even more as a result.

Over just the last year 41 states have cut spending for public higher education. That’s on top of deep cuts in 2009 and 2010. Some, such as the University of New Hampshire, have lost over 40 percent of their state funding; the University of Washington, 26 percent; Florida’s public university system, 25 percent.

Rising tuition and fees are making up the shortfall. This year, the average hike is 8.3 percent. New York’s state university system is increasing tuition 14 percent; Arizona, 17 percent; Washington state, 16 percent. Students in California’s public universities and colleges are facing an average increase of 21 percent, the highest in the nation.

The children of middle and lower-income families are hardest hit. Remember: The median wage has been dropping since 2000, adjusted for inflation.

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I had a fleeting thought that she was actually asking me to pick up those items for her, but I preferred to think we were playing a cellphone game. I try not to be a helicopter parent. Experience as a mother and professor has taught me how badly that can backfire.

Instead, I prefer a more hands-off approach, which came naturally. From the time Allison turned 18 something kicked in, and I simply no longer had any desire to know her work schedule or pick up her tampons. I remember wondering if this was as instinctual as nursing her or bundling her up when she was a baby.  But that's not what I see at Drexel University, where I teach and where my daughters go to school. The vast majority of my students talk to their parents three times a day or more. One student's mother called when she didn’t hear from him for a few days. He picked up the phone, but he was in the library and so he whispered “hello.” She accused him of being hung over or drunk, even though it was about 10 a.m. on a Tuesday.  He tried to convince her, avoiding eye contact with those library patrons giving him exasperated looks, but she insisted that he take a picture of himself, in the library, holding a newspaper with that day’s date, and send it to her. I cannot shake how similar that is to a hostage situation.

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People from Texas understood what he meant; it was like when the University of Texas played Texas A&M or Oklahoma. To Oklahomans, it was like when their Sooners play Texas or Nebraska. People from Michigan and Ohio understood -- it was like when Michigan played Ohio State, and they had to pass out fliers to fans of the visiting team advising “Wear jackets over your team colors and don’t take them off until seated.” (The same flier suggested driving across the state line in a rental car with neutral-state license plates.)

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It's a huge mess.

Some people have noticed that "student loan debt" comes up a lot among the Wall Street Occupiers and the members of the 99 percent movement. Often, older people, who either attended school when tuition was reasonable, or who didn't attend college at all in an era when a high school diploma was enough of a qualification for a stable, middle-class career, tend to think this is all the entitled whining of spoiled kids. They don't understand that these kids accepted a home mortgage worth of debt before they ever even had a regular income, based on phony promises, and that the debt is inescapable, regardless of life circumstances or ability to pay.

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I've been reading several of your columns from the last week with particular interest. Like the young lady who only wanted to play with kids and babies, I was also drawn in by your answer to the woman who found herself dismayed by her dream job. I have something of a different problem – intellectually, I know that I would not enjoy my dream job and that it would make me miserable. Yet, that has not made it any less my dream job.

You see, like the young lady from last Friday's column who was good at seeming OK, I went to an expensive, elite college and graduated with mediocre grades and many more acquaintances than actual friends, although I was never quite as miserable as she was. I came from a working-class background and went through my four years there believing that going to an Ivy League school or equivalent on scholarship and becoming a professional was one of the few avenues of social mobility left in America that did not require nearly miraculous amounts of luck or once-in-a-generation-level genius, and that by doing so I could become, if not part of the 1 percent, then the 10 percent. Well, it turned out that I really was not very good at either science or math, only good enough to be better than my classmates in high school (many of whom did not go on to college), and that meant that I would never be a doctor or an investment banker or a strategy consultant like most of my college classmates. And for a while I didn't know what to do, and spent most of my days sitting around in my room. I was, however, still a competent writer, and ended up majoring in political science and going to law school in large part due to what I felt was a lack of any viable alternative although my mediocre grades meant that my law school was slightly less prestigious than my undergraduate school.

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I'm writing to you because I feel lost. I'm in my early 30s and I feel like I don't know anything, from the big questions (what is the meaning of all of this, who am I, etc.) to the simplest like what I want to do with my free time. Not that I expect to have all of the answers, but I feel like I don't have an inner compass or guiding voice to navigate through the world and make decisions. I've accomplished very little because I've wasted so much time and energy just thinking and ruminating about these things and I'm tiring myself out. I'm beginning to fear that I'm going to spend the rest of my life just kind of muddling and flailing through, never really directing my life or giving myself over to anything or anyone completely.

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May I just say that the very first Since You Asked column debuted Oct. 17, 2001, which makes Oct. 17, 2011, the 10th anniversary of this column, and that I am in some way celebrating? And that you, too, may feel free to celebrate, in any fashion you choose? (I have known of this impending anniversary for a few weeks and imagined elaborate fireworks displays and so forth, but with so many competing activities right now, a simple acknowledgment will have to do.)

Dear Cary,

I have been wanting to write to you for a while, but I always put it off because I think I can fix it myself or that the feeling will pass. As time wears on, I no longer believe that I can.

I am soon to graduate from a big, expensive university with a middling GPA. As I slog my way through this semester, I find myself feeling ever more hopeless and withdrawn. Upon arriving on campus freshman year, I promptly had a complete nervous breakdown. I was a thousand miles away from home, surrounded by all these golden children of Westchester and Greenwich, and I couldn't handle it. I begged my parents to withdraw me from school, but they couldn't comprehend why I would react in such a way. I stuck it out through freshman, sophomore and junior year at the same school. I was miserable each and every single day the entire time.

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"You’ll love it here," my parents assured me. Looking around at the beaming faces of my fellow freshmen the first day of school, my stomach churned with uncertainty. These kids looked a lot like the people I didn't like at my high school: Coach bags, Lacoste alligators on every chest, blond highlights zebra-streaking the girls’ hair, the guys hiding behind mirrored Ray Bans. And me? I made my own purses out of duct tape, bought my clothes at Macy’s on sale and dyed my hair burgundy some months, tomato-red others.

I spent the majority of my first nights looking to drown my loneliness at the on-campus apartments. Every evening, I shimmied into my tightest jeans and a v-neck top that didn’t look too off-brand, covered my eyes in black shadow and masked my nervousness with Maybelline. I hid behind a solo cup, a come-hither smile warding off meaningful conversation. Every morning, I awoke to blinding sunlight and the realization that I was having the stereotypical college experience the movies had warned me about: booze-soaked, rap-infused and vapid.

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Our team captain, a 200-pound hulk of a man, was walking from freshman to freshman with a large vat of vegetable oil, and letting it cascade all over them one by one. "Be prepared to have the worst acne of your lives over the next week," he warned us. A tarp nearby had also been covered in oil, and other members of the team were streaming into the backyard with bottles of beer to watch what was about to happen. When my turn came, I closed my eyes. As I felt the liquid drip into my shoes, he leaned over and said, "Get ready to wrestle." 

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Such idiocy is the product of many variables. There's been interest-group maneuvering and temperance-movement hypocrisy. There's been hippie-hating rage and reefer-madness paranoia. And, most invisibly, there's been college.

Though little noticed for its role in America's selective War on Drugs, the university system has now become a key player shotgunning the oxymoronic "alcohol is acceptable but pot is evil" mentality down the beer-bong-primed throats of America's youth. To see how it all works, consider the University of Colorado.

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OK, I've watched/listened to this video of Democrat Rep. Barney Frank talking to Rachel Maddow three times now, and it definitely sounds like a fart.

We can pretend like there are more important things going on in American politics right now than a natural bodily function, but let's not kid ourselves. Flatulence remains the No. 1 key issue for voters during election years; everyone knows that.

2. The smallest living area in New York that you still can't afford:

For only $800 a month, you too can live in this 78-square foot closet that some Manhattan real estate dealer pawned off as an apartment.

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