Why+Do+Politicians+Blame+Teachers+and+Students+for+Their+Busted+Budgets?

=__**Why do politicians blame teachers and students for their busted budgets?**__=

I'm in our campus gym, watching prospective students and their parents get dive-bombed by a remote-controlled toy blimp. The blimp is silver with the word PITT in big blue letters on one side.
==The chairman of our humanities division, a good and earnest man in a corduroy jacket, mans the remote. He is also a professor of philosophy. A background in philosophy isn't a good match for remote-controlled toys. The blimp doesn't respond to reason.==

Look in our Faculty Parking Lot. The cars are average, not luxury. A few are beaters or worse. I drive an old Ford Focus that's missing two hubcaps.
==I do not, despite what one student recently asked me, get kickbacks from authors like Ernest Hemingway or Anton Chekov when I suggest people buy and read their books. I, like my students, come from Western Pennsylvania. My father was a millwright. I was the first in my family to go to college.==

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==At Discovery Day, I man my information table. I've brought props for writing majors -- student literary magazines, news clippings, copies of books by our faculty, copies of books by our alumni. I've overdone it, over-compensating, I guess, because I feel the need to tell everyone how wonderful our writing program is, how smart it is for students to major in writing, to take writing classes.==

Most academics teach better than they sell. We tend to scare parents and students even more than the dive-bombing blimp, and so many of them hang back like skeptical buyers at a yard sale.
==Two tables down, my friend is representing the performing arts major. On his table, there's a leering plastic skull. "Hamlet," he says to a scared-looking young girl when she points at it. "You know." He strikes a dramatic pose. The girl flees.==

Everything's so uncertain.
==At Discovery Day, when someone from admissions calls out prospective students by major, the largest group is interested in criminal justice. I don't know if all these students choose this major because they love it. I suspect shows like "CSI" help. I also suspect that one of the only sure things right now is that there will always be criminals, and people to catch them.==

Now Pennsylvania.
=="Corbett testified that the state is broke," my friend Bob Pajich, a reporter and poet, recently Facebooked and Tweeted and blogged and railed at dinner parties. "Pennsylvania has $1.4 trillion worth of natural gas underneath us and he claims we're broke. Arrest that man!"== =="The future of these countries is their young people," President Barack Obama recently said at a press conference, talking about the revolutions in the Middle East. "These young people deserve a chance for a better future. They deserve education. They deserve good jobs. They deserve a chance to build better lives for their families."==

The cost of Mr. Corbett's budget proposal is this: students and their dreams. That is, young people and their families and an education that may stretch further out of reach.
==Back in the gym, the blimp is stuck in between the bleachers. Our division chair jiggles the remote. He holds it over his head and down low. He does everything he can to save it, but the blimp stays stuck, stubborn as a politician.== ==**Lori Jakiela** is an associate professor of English at the University of Pittsburgh's Greensburg campus and teaches in the Master's of Fine Arts program at Chatham University. She is the author of a memoir, "Miss New York Has Everything" and the forthcoming poetry collection "The Mill Hunk's Daughter Meets the Queen of Sky"==