by Danielle Douglas-Gabriel

Public universities once flush with state dollars have watched that financial support dry up, while facing pressure from education reform groups bent on reconfiguring their business model. This has led to some epic battles that are chronicled in a new documentary called “Starving the Beast: The Battle to Disrupt and Reform America’s Public Universities.”

The film, which opens Friday in Washington, posits that the ideal of higher education as a public good is being supplanted by a market-based ideology that views education as a commodity to be consumed by students at their own expense.