Leadership Quote by Louise Slaughter

A politician’s eye for power shows up in the staging here: “stand outside dining halls, dorms, and academic buildings” maps the campus like a supply chain. Slaughter isn’t just describing marketing; she’s sketching a carefully engineered ambush. The targets aren’t generic consumers, they’re students at their most predictable moments of vulnerability: hungry, tired, rushing, socially exposed. By listing everyday spaces, she turns the university into a funnel where private finance can intercept public life.

The sharpest move is the phrase “pay college students generously.” “Generously” does double duty: it signals predatory asymmetry (a small payout to the recruiter, long-term interest payments from the recruit) and it frames the transaction as moral misdirection. The system recruits peers to sell debt to peers, laundering corporate intent through friendship, proximity, and campus credibility. It’s not merely that credit cards are offered; it’s that persuasion is outsourced to people who look like you, speak your language, and share your schedule.

Context matters: Slaughter was a consumer-protection Democrat who pushed restrictions on credit card marketing to young adults, especially before the CARD Act era tightened some practices. Read through that lens, the sentence is less a neutral observation than an indictment of a business model built on inexperience. The real accusation is institutional: colleges tolerate the sidewalk sales pitch at the edges of “academic buildings,” while students are taught economics inside them. That contrast is the point, and it lands because it feels like a quiet scandal hiding in plain sight.