Lend and Rule: Fighting the Shadow Financialization of Public Universities - Tapa blanda

Acerca del autor

Coalition Against Campus Debt is a collective of educators and organizers active in higher education struggles as well as the debt abolition movement more widely for over a decade. Members include Jason Wozniak, Eleni Schirmer, Dana Morrison, Joanna Gonsalves, Richard Levy, Maria del Mar Rosa Rodriguez, Sofya Aptekar, Tracy Berger, and Barbara Madeloni.
 
* * *
 
Sofya Aptekar is an associate professor of urban studies at the City University of New York School of Labor and Urban Studies. She is the author of Green Card Soldier (MIT, 2023) and a delegate of the Professional Staff Congress.
 
Tracy Berger is a mom of two, member of United Campus Workers Colorado, and staff organizer with Higher Education Labor United (HELU). She previously worked as staff at the University of Colorado Boulder and Front Range Community College.
 
María del Mar Rosa-Rodríguez is an associate professor of Hispanic Studies at the University of Puerto Rico at Cayey, and the president of the faculty union of the UPR, Asociación Puertorriqueña de Profesores Universitarios (APPU). She is also the cofounder of the Junte de Mujeres Sindicalistas, bringing together feminism and syndicalism.
 
Joanna Gonsalves is a psychology professor at Salem State University and president of the Massachusetts State College Association faculty union.
 
Rich Levy is a professor of Political Science emeritus at Salem State University and a member of Educators for a Democratic Union. He and Joanna Gonsalves are coordinators of the Massachusetts Campus Debt Reveal and the Massachusetts Anti-Privatization Project, both funded by the Massachusetts Teachers Association.
 
Barbara Madeloni is an organizer and writer for Labor Notes.
 
Dana Morrison is an associate professor in the Educational Foundations and Policy Studies Department at West Chester University of Pennsylvania and chapter secretary of the Association of Pennsylvania State College and University Faculties.
 
Eleni Schirmer is a writer living in Montréal. She organizes with the Debt Collective.
 
Jason Thomas Wozniak is an associate professor in the Educational Foundations and Policy Studies Department, Coordinator of the Transformative Education and Social Change Program, and Co-Director of The Latin American Philosophy of Education Society (LAPES) at West Chester University. He is also a long-term organizer with Debt Collective.

Fragmento. © Reproducción autorizada. Todos los derechos reservados.

Contemporary social justice movements negotiate difficult terrain when fighting against the entire structure of a global economic order. Movements must seek victories in both their immediate and long-term struggles. Many activists target the individuals responsible for making “bad” decisions—the politicians or corporate elite who work to maintain smooth political and economic conditions for themselves while leaving the rest behind. Movements target these evil henchmen while fighting to win economic concessions to ameliorate the precarity of 21st-century capitalism. Fights for better wages and increased benefits (e.g., sick or childcare days) seek to make life just a bit more bearable in the current system.

These reform efforts matter – a lot. But they are just that, reform movements that temporarily alleviate suffering under capitalism. We must constantly ask whether and how these reforms threaten the capitalist social relations and modes of production that (re)produce gross inequities, racial and gender hierarchies, and neocolonial rule. Following Rosa Luxemburg, we might aspire for our campaigns to serve revolutionary goals, not merely reformist ones. What’s the difference? Reform-based campaigns treat reforms as ends in themselves: we can pack up and go home after winning the wage increase, a few more sick days, a more culturally diverse table or once we have fired a boss, administrator, or morally bankrupt politician. Nevertheless, the system that produces and reproduces societal ills remains intact, stultifying revolutionary potential. In contrast, revolution seeks to address and change the root causes of oppression. It aims to replace one system of rule with another, end one type of political economy and construct an alternative.

The authors of this book ultimately take a nuanced both/and approach to analysis and organizing in the contemporary debt economy. We seek to both develop theoretical insights to aid tactical planning for reform, and create analysis that contributes to long-term strategic objectives for radically transforming the dominant system. We hope to support, uplift, and highlight debt abolition campaigns that target individual careerists and accomplices of evil-doing and the struggles for basic economic and cultural rights that guarantee the dignity of all people. At the same time, we recognize that inclusion into the dominant system and fights to make life a little less difficult in the current order are necessary but insufficient. If we abolish debts but leave the system producing debts active, then there is still work to do. Planning either reform or revolution in higher education—or better, planning reforms that hasten revolution— necessitates an analysis of the debt economy. To oversimplify our case, debt is at the heart of the neoliberal economy and should be centered in any theoretical, tactical, and strategic plan to transform our education institutions and the political economy they exist within. Far too often, education reformers misidentify the true culprits and subsequently misdirect efforts at change.

One lesson worth heeding comes from The Grapes of Wrath, one of the most moving American novels on life in debt. The novel chronicles the story of an indebted family of farmers, the Joads, who have been evicted from their land. They are victims of an insatiable ontologically indistinguishable “monster (that) has to have profits all the time.” The tenants survive the Great Depression by nourishing bonds of solidarity with one another as they resist debt-imposed injustice. In one memorable scene, an old family acquaintance comes, atop a tractor, to clear the land and bulldoze a tenant’s house. He’s got orders to follow. The tenant quickly realizes that the driver is part of a machine, merely ancillary to something larger than himself. He desperately seeks someone real, or something concrete, to fight back against. If he shoots the driver, he will just be replaced. If he targets the bank president or Board of Directors, the tenant would still deal with the profit-hungry system the president and Board serve. Facing starvation and perplexed, the tenant finally asks: "But where does it stop? Who can we shoot? I don't aim to starve to death before I kill the man that's starving me." The driver gets to the heart of the matter: "I don't know. Maybe there's nobody to shoot. Maybe the thing isn't man at all.”

Like the dispossessed farmer, progressive circles often direct indignation at individuals: administrators, state government officials, Board of Trustees members, and others who pull the strings of austerity. However, like the tractor driver, they serve a larger force. We can remove a person from the (tractor) chair, but the chair remains. Replacing one cast of characters running our universities with another more progressive one will not stop the machine they are responsible to. It will keep plowing ahead in directions that favor private creditors over the public good.

Our taxation and debt system creates rampant wealth inequalities that are reflected within higher education. The debt economy monster drains the lifeblood out of higher education and feeds the growth of social inequality. However, if we properly diagnose the root causes of higher education inequality and form bonds of debtor resistance, we can put it to rest. Higher education is one of many sites of struggle from which to challenge the debt economy. While we do not think that winning university debt abolition would overthrow the debt economy, we believe that it is a strategic institution from which to collectively wage a battle against financial capitalism.