One of the great things about living in Washington is that we have license to be incredibly snotty about all things California. Their earthquakes are worse than ours, their vapid Hollywood culture makes Seattle look positively European, everything is more expensive there, and we all know that everyone there secretly wants to move here. And…

The good news is that everybody’s talking about our state universities. The bad news is that all they want to do is rearrange the deck chairs. Governor Gregoire’s Department of Education proposal (which won’t solve anything but must be grudgingly admired as an attempt to both grab power and shift cost away from the state)…

Last summer Governor Gregoire appointed a Higher Education Funding Task Force to develop a “realistic and viable long-range funding strategy” for our state universities and come up with ways to improve our “accountability and performance.” Last Monday the Task Force released its recommendations. The task force was composed primarily of well-dressed and articulate business big…