Feldman discounts this argument. He points out that students demand a broader bundle of services from college now than they did 50 years ago, and that the price reflects that. Students want staffers to plan student life activities, career counselors, fancy dorms, nice gyms and up to date technology.

You know what they say when there’s trouble,” he added. “You know what rolls downhill.

Recent research on population and income dynamics in four Rust-Belt cities shows that neighborhoods with the lowest housing prices are the ones that experience the steepest declines in population, but that income falls more sharply in neighborhoods with middle-tier house prices. These patterns are the reverse of a gentrification process. Both processes involve the borders of poor and rich neighborhoods. But where gentrification typically leads to an outward expansion of high-income neighborhoods into low-income neighborhoods, reverse gentrification involves an inward contraction of high-income neighborhoods, as the border areas become low-income.

It’s Woodrow Wilson. An enthusiastic supporter of Espionage Act prosecutions, the progressive, detached, technocratic Wilson was so convinced of his own virtue that he was willing to jail the Socialist candidate for President, Eugene V. Debs for his mild criticism of the war, even as he championed progressive reforms such as the Federal Reserve and the Federal Trade Commission, both of them designed with the help of his economic advisor, Louis Brandeis. Wilson had a sorry record on civil liberties, and once Brandeis was on the Supreme Court, he eloquently criticized the Wilson administration for its betrayal of progressive values such as free speech and transparency, declaring that “sunlight is the best disinfectant,” and unforgettably extolling the necessity of protecting political dissent. Let’s hope today’s progressives teach the Wilsonian Obama a similar lesson.