Free your campus

I've spent the week mad as hell about the wretched bankruptcy bill the credit card companies are pushing through our Rent-a-Congress.

It's encouraging to see how broad and bipartisan popular opposition to this bill seems to be. Anyway, to keep up to the minute on bankruptcy bill developments, check out the special edition of Talking Points Memo. Once this bill is signed into law, the following gains an added degree of urgency.

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By my junior year of college I'd had enough of the credit card advertisements.

They were on every bulletin board on campus. They were on the boards in the mailroom, in the dorms, even on the boards of the various academic departments.

Back then a year at Eastern University cost about $15,000. The theory, apparently, was that anybody who could afford to pay for school must also be a worthy credit risk. So we were all "pre-approved" — even though most of us had little or no income that wasn't already dedicated to paying tuition, not to mention thousands of dollars in educational debt already piled up and waiting for us after graduation.

One of the problems with all those student loans is that they limit graduates' options. Maybe you want to use your education in the nonprofit sector, or in social services, or the arts — those options aren't available to you if repaying your educational loans requires you to seek a bigger paycheck.

Yet as burdensome as student loans can be, they're nothing compared to the indentured servitude of many of the students who responded to those omnipresent credit card advertisements.

I didn't like the way those ads were luring so many of my friends and classmates into perpetual debt. And I didn't like the way all this increasing debt was changing the nature of higher education into a kind of glorified vo-tech system that was meant to do little more than enhance your future earning potential.

So like I said, I'd had enough.

I took down the ads. Every last one of them. I recycled all the posters, the fliers, the business reply envelopes.

They replaced them, of course, but I got rid of all of those as well. It became a weekly ritual. I'd make the rounds regularly. I carried a staple remover wherever I went.

So the point here is, if you're a college student, or a college professor, or even if you're the parent of a college student: Get yourself a staple remover.

Buy two and give one to a friend. But when you buy them, pay cash.