College costs

Michael J. Illuzzi is right about the downside of serious cuts in funding the liberal arts in higher education, but he misses a very simple remedy to the outrageous cost of attending college today. (“Liberals arts cuts hurt students & country,” Jan. 1, 2024.) If colleges would fire 95% of their administrators, who already outnumber the faculty, immediate and very substantial reductions would be incurred for financially struggling students and their families. Anyone familiar with higher education today knows full well that the vast majority of administrators  in higher education not only are not needed, but are in fact a malign force since they think up such academic horrors as restrictive and censorious speech codes and the kangaroo courts that enforce them.

This is in part why I’m undertaking a petition candidacy for the Harvard Board of Overseers. My platform will be, in part, the repeal of such restrictions, thereby restoring free speech and academic freedom, all the while making a college education more affordable.

Harvey Silverglate

Cambridge

Housing immigrants

Those of us not living in sanctuary states like Massachusetts read stories like the one about Democrat infighting over housing illegal immigrants with keen interest. There were 242 families on a waitlist for state-funded housing on Dec. 13, two weeks later that number is 391 with their Emergency Assistance Director saying, no, it’s actually 400 families (and growing).

As the Boston Herald reports, “In a signed affidavit filed in Suffolk County Superior Court, Administration and Finance Assistant Secretary Aditya Basheer laid out the projected cost (of these programs)… “If family shelter net caseload continues to expand at a rate consistent with the activity of the last several months (t)his projected caseload would result in family shelter and associated programs costs of approximately $1.1 billion in FY24.”

Residents of Massachusetts need to see the humanitarian crisis the whole idea of open borders, of which sanctuary cities and states are a large part, creates.  In the long term, it is inhumane to drag the government-dependent global third world population into America’s urban communities, where our own poor reside thanks to other Democrat policies. But in the short term, people voting for the Democrats creating these crises should pay for them locally – not another federal dime should flow into any illegal “sanctuary” policies, in Cambridge, Chicago, San Francisco, New York, or anywhere else.  And if people in these cities don’t like the crime, filth, and debt associated with these policies, replace the politicians behind them. Until then, you broke it, you buy it.

Nick McNulty

Windham, NH