I feel like Archie Bunker

Young people … Heh! – People under 50 from my perspective now … are likely to not have any idea who Archie Bunker was.

All In The Family was an earthquake sized television phenomenon that aired for nine seasons, from 1971 to 1979. It was a cultural icon over forty years ago! But to get a flavor of what it was about, just read the lyrics of the theme song.

Boy the way Glenn Miller played
Songs that made the hit parade.
Guys like us we had it made,
Those were the days.

And you knew who you were then,
Girls were girls and men were men,
Mister we could use a man
Like Herbert Hoover again.

Didn’t need no welfare state,
Everybody pulled his weight.
Gee our old LaSalle ran great.
Those were the days.

The thing that changed the most is that today, Archie and “Meathead” (the son-in-law who was a full time student at an unnamed university) could live together in the same house. Today, the “family” often can’t even stand to be in the same room together.

And that brings me to my main theme – a university education – something that Meathead and I have in common.

A current headline news item is a study by Tufts University which reveals that it will cost undergraduates as much as $96,000 to attend a prestige northeastern university. They should know. Tufts is a prestige northeastern university. Part of the cost is funding studies like that. These days, families have to submit financial records to prove that they can afford a year’s tuition. Truth! I checked it out at their website.

Back in the late 1960’s, I got an engineering degree from the University of Utah. Some of the richest entrepreneurs (the founder of Adobe software, for example) graduated from the same U of U engineering program. In the television show, All In The Family, Archie Bunker worked on the loading docks. My dad was a construction carpenter. My mother was a school teacher. Both Meathead and I didn’t work at all during the school year.

Those were the days.

CNN interviewed a retired school administrator from one of those northwestern universities and asked him why costs were so high. He blamed the cost of tending to the psychological and cultural needs of students today. He blamed the cost of dealing with increasingly intrusive government regulators. He blamed the cost of attracting premier academics (who often don’t teach at all).

Gaaaakkk!!!! When I went from rural Utah (a coal mining town) to the U of U, I had trouble adjusting to the much more competitive environment too. The counseling service was housed in re-purposed WWII wooden barracks. The wooden stairs and floors creaked and groaned. They gave me some standardized tests to make sure it wasn’t “organic” like a brain tumor or something. Then they basically told me, “Get over it.” It was the best counseling I ever had. Actually, it was the only counseling I ever had.

Those were the days.

I often quote Mark Twain to explain things like this. History doesn’t repeat. But it rhymes. The REAL reason prestige northeastern universities charge that much is that they can. There is a fraction of America that can pay $96,000 a year with their lunch money. Read some of the work of Robert Reich (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Reich) – Obama’s labor secretary and now at a prestige California university.

The most graphic ancestor of the divide in America is the French Revolution where just being rich – or even looking like you were – got a lot of people killed. Some great French scientists were executed just because they looked rich.

Do you know why earthquakes happen? Two blocks of the Earth’s crust slide past each other over millions of years. But they don’t move continuously, they “stick” where they touch each other and the tension builds up over centuries until the two blocks finally move all at once. The release of all that tension shakes the world and destroys everything nearby. The same thing happens with an avalanche. The same thing happens with a forest fire. The same thing happens with a volcano.

Next time, it’s very possible that no one will be left to sing, “Those were the days.”