In his bid to become the GOP’s pick for the presidency next year, Ohio governor John Kasich has made higher education reform a focal point of his candidacy. To that end, the alumnus of the failed Wall Street financial firm Lehman Brothers is employing principles straight out of the Koch brothers’ textbook that helped him win the Ohio’s governorship in 2010: anti-labor, faux populism.

Consider the pot shots Kasich has taken at that endangered species, the tenured professor, for being excessively timorous. Or his nod to the perception of professors as underworked by including a micromanagerial workload stipulation in nearly every proposed state budget. He’s waxed philosophical about access, affordability and accountability. And he’s joined the rest of the GOP in piling on to teachers’ unions at a “school choice” (newspeak for “anti-public school”) rally.



These are all attempts to show that he’s the candidate who really understands the needs and anxieties of the middle class. But Kasich’s policy is not designed with the middle-class in mind: it is intended to benefit big money interests.

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Take two initiatives Kasich bragged about in the most recent GOP debate: his move to tie the state’s subsidy of public universities to completion (though he equivocates here between course completion and graduation) and his creation of a higher education task force on accountability and efficiency.



The makeup of this commission, drawn entirely from the financial and administrative class, without the inclusion of a single teacher or student, speaks to Kasich’s anti-labor biases. But far more telling is what the task force looks poised to do.



This body is in the process of conducting a comprehensive audit whose initial findings have included calls for program cuts, a move to more online general education and the privatization of many of the university’s resources.

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And though these proposals are being touted as ways to keep college affordable to the middle class, their actual impact is much more likely to be the further weakening of labor and reduced government investment in higher education.



Then there is his promotion of online education as a way to increase access to college courses. Using online education to improve access makes sense in the developing world, for example, where geography and poor infrastructure make universities materially inaccessible to many citizens. But it makes less sense in a populous state like Ohio (and frankly in almost every part of the United States), which enjoys a huge network of community colleges and universities. Here, the issue is less physical access than economic access.

So why push for online education? Because it benefits the private sector. To understand how, take the example of my institution, the University of Toledo, which is part of the Ohio public university system.



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As at many universities, face-to-face classes are “owned” by colleges and departments. Their rights to control the curriculum and, to a certain extent, delivery is recognized by the university’s collective bargaining agreement and by the Higher Learning Commission, our accrediting body. Ownership of online courses, meanwhile, is directly under the provost’s office (the centralized administration). Ownership of course content, rather than lying with the faculty, belongs to the university.

Online courses are therefore much easier to sell off through a “public-private” partnership. That’s exactly what happened at another Ohio public university, the University of Akron, when it agreed to have its online nursing program administered by Academic Partnerships, despite concerns about an alleged “prior relationship” with the university president, Scott Scarborough.

Other changes in Kasich’s proposal, such as program consolidation and selling or leasing “non-academic” (read: revenue-generating) assets would also likely be a huge windfall to Wall Street because they would make the position of faculty more precarious and therefore presumably cheaper. Program cuts are one of the most common ways of firing tenured professors while also liquidating and privatizing much of the capital currently tied up in public universities.

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Unfortunately, it is often the rhetorical flourishes of Kasich’s anti-union diatribes that get the most attention. But what looks like a populist attack on the intellectual elite turns out, on closer inspection, to be a boondoggle for the propertied class.



Some kind of populist posturing is, of course, essential for appealing to the current GOP base, particularly for a candidate whose ties to both the political and financial elites are deep.



But of all the tropes that the wannabe populist can avail her- or himself of, one of the main advantages of going after universities is that they represent a real point of convergence between the anti-intellectualism of the right-wing base and the material interests of Wall Street in breaking labor and privatizing public goods.

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It’s too bad that, by the time those in the middle class realize their futures have been sold, Wall Street will have already bundled and sold them on the futures market. That is, if Kasich has his way.

• The subheading on this article was amended on 5 November 2015. An earlier version said “nominee” where “candidate” was meant.