Johnny Sagan's Page

My Facebook status currently reads "Johnny wants a federal university system...holler back for more details."

My original status message, in which I was trying to be as efficient as possible in a hopeless attempt to fit Facebook's word limit, was "Johnny Sagan wants a federal university system, each site to include a federal university hospital, arranged around the country so that an order of magnitude more Americans have access to the economic and quality-of-life penumbra of such institutions, and all connected by an economy-stimulating high speed railroad."

This idea arose from a conversation Allen Makere and I were having, about Chicago's increased chance of getting the 2016 Olympics now that Barack Obama is President. We were noting that those Olympics would be a final celebration of his presidency, coming at the end of his second term, and the talk turned to what he would do in retirement. I blurted out, thinking at the same time that I DEFINITELY didn't want him to go the route of corporate sinecures, like, like...a George Bush I or someone, "And he better not head a bullshit-ass self-aggrandizing foundation like Bill Clinton! He needs to go back and be a university president!" But where, I thought? Harvard? Redundant, like bringing coals BACK to Newcastle, and therefore not a good look for Obama OR Harvard, especially not after the New New Deal Presidency OTUS I hope he has. The U of I? Podunk, and, if not podunk, somehow ungenerous to the rest of the country. And that's when it hit me: Barack Obama could serve as the first president of a new federal university system that would be the enduring legacy of his presidency!

My mom is an educational policy wonk. Well, she's more of an educational policy mom, with (a crazy son and...) a single-minded, grassroots passion for making public primary and secondary school better for kids and teachers, the best it can be. No wonder she gravitated our family to Evanston, with its critical mass of like-minded parents and tantalizing diversity of realized and unrealized potential in its children. She was PTA president at Washington School, and later served an unsung term on the District 65 School Board: she was present the day Hecky Powell called Evanston's mixed-race royalty "mutts" at a public meeting. She's ALWAYS talking about how one of the smartest school reforms we could make would be to make a single set of educational standards for the entire country, and then to federally fund those standards, saying it would save money, time, and inequality over the present patchwork of state school systems. I have always agreed with her, while seeing "states' rights" sentiment as the main political obstacle to federalizing the schools. As to that, though, my opinion is that leaving a matter as important as the high-quality education (and training) of our children up to good, bad, and indifferent--not to mention rich, poor, and middle-class--state governments, just because of an outmoded conventional wisdom that saw that as a sacred symbol of state independence, is the kind of political tradition we are finally in a position to let go.

You see, I really like the cut of Barack Obama's jib. I love the sense of fallibility in all those speeches, first of all! But I guess I'm most excited about the ethic of professionalism I see in him and his clique, and also, and not least, by the high-tech organizing savvy. I think the Obama administration may be able to use these two qualities to set up new institutions, like a federal university system, not to mention national health care or real assistance for the unemployed and foreclosed-upon, that seem politically and practically unimaginable to many people today.

I want a federal university network to come out of Barack Obama's administration, with the university hospitals and the high speed rail, because building it would "prime the pump" in the sense of Keynesian economic policy on a majestic scale. And not only that, for the fact is that higher education is America's greatest growth industry for the 21st century, with good consequences for the United States economy, internally and globally. Just go to New York City, that planetary pinnacle and microcosm, and look at all the ads for local colleges seeking international students on the subway. Witness the impressive yuppification, er, re-planning of the South Loop in Chicago, all because of the influx of undergraduates from the Greater Midwest. You and I have seen our quality of life improved by growing up in the neighborhood of Northwestern University and Evanston Hospital. My people in Hyde Park, one of Evanston's demographic sister cities, and Madison, Wisconsin, to name another one, not to mention Berkeley and Palo Alto, California, have seen it, too. I want the campuses of the federal university to be sited using the kind of brilliant demographic research Obama's ground game exemplified, so that an order of magnitude more Americans can grow up with the same opportunities we had due to the proximity of a good school and a good hospital. Evanston is infamous on the North Shore for what the burghers of Kenilworth see as our foolish decision to use these high property taxes to provide a generous social safety net for the poorer half of our population, but trust me, the university professors who live here, and the doctors, if no one else, are happy to pay. And trust me when I say--or don't, just tell me why!--that in the financially melted-down United States of America that Barack Obama and the rest of the Baby Boomers' children are inheriting, university education is going to be one of America's most lucrative exports. During a financial crisis characterized by evaporating real-estate values, poor future prospects for high-tech job creation under the current educational dispensation, and the loss of consumers' ability to even buy things as credit markets dry up, building a series of federal university complexes is not only one of the best targets for government spending on tangible infrastructure, but possibly the greatest.

Why the greatest? For the same reason my mother wants a federal school system for kids. Intellectually, we have a store of knowledge and skill of the highest caliber in this country. Our laissez-faire system of distributing places in the classroom to people who need that knowledge and skill has reached the limit of its reach, though, if that makes sense, and, for it to even function at the high level it does as an incubator for talented leaders like Barack Obama, it requires exceptional feats of self-sacrifice from people like Stanley Anne and Marilyn Dunham, his mother and grandmother, and millions of other obsessive parents. Too many other people, talented people, fall through the cracks or see themselves cut off from the path they would have chosen, due to the isolation and individualism of getting a higher education in the United States in 2008. For the Barack Obamas of the future, the federal university system I envision would make a much clearer path to either public service or the purest research, much like a mixture of India's Institutes of Technology and France's Grandes Ecoles (like the formidable Sciences Po). For the Obama Nation of the future--the ordinary people, mostly middle class, who elected Barack Obama president--the federal university system would be the new foundation of American community.

Holler back!

Your Friend,

Johnny Sagan