September 2009

When University of Florida administrator Jeanna Mastrodicasa was a student living in a dorm at the University of Georgia, she had to dial collect to call home. And she didn’t do it all that often.

Fast forward two decades, and you find college students like Tiana Johnson, who talks to her mother every day, “maybe every couple of hours.” The two also exchange frequent text messages. And they’re connected through Facebook, the increasingly popular social networking site that allows Tiana’s mother to see pictures and “status updates” documenting Tiana’s college experience.

. . .

“When a student and parent are calling and texting all day, what happens is the kid has the parent in their head, so there is not that liberation there once was in college to just make your own decisions,” said Middlebury College psychology professor Barbara Hofer. “There is not a lot of independent decisionmaking going on.

“It’s a serious concern in terms of who they become in the workplace and in society.”

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Allison Stanger is the Russell Leng ‘60 Professor of International Politics and Economics at Middlebury  College. Her book, One Nation Under Contract: The Outsourcing of American Power and the Future of Foreign Policy, will be published by Yale University Press in October.

Recent revelations of contractor involvement in CIA covert operations have been shocking. Plotting assassinations of al Qaeda operatives. Planning and executing the harsh interrogation (torture) of suspected terrorists. Loading Hellfire Missiles on Predator drones. At first glance, this looks like free-market fundamentalism taken to its logical extreme, something to blame on the Bush administration. But that conclusion misses the real reasons why the work of government is increasingly in corporate hands. The CIA deploys contractors because it no longer has the in-house capacity to pursue new mission-critical tasks without an assist from the private sector.

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