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Title: We Are the Crisis Author: Anonymous Date: November 2009 Language: en Topics: academy, education Source: Retrieved on November 19, 2009 from http://zinelibrary.info/vision-new-university-brief-list-impossible-demands
The first question that might present itself to anyone engaged in the
current struggles at the university is this: is the university to be
saved or destroyed?
To some, the answer seems obvious. Those who hope to salvage what may be
no more than the university’s illusion of public service certainly are
right to see higher education as a path towards improved opportunities,
towards a more even distribution of economic promise, without regards to
race, gender and class. Therefore, demanding that financial aid and work
study programs, cultural events, and course offerings in more
potentially progressive departments such as Women’s Studies, Chicano/a
Studies and African American Studies stay off the chopping block is more
than just; it is necessary.
To others, the opposite answer seems equally obvious. The university has
become nothing more than one more space for venture apictalists to
invest in, a space that, through tuition hikes, cuts to affirmative
action and cultural programs excludes those it claims to help. It
becomes a space where careerist twenty-somethings can buy their tickets
to all the sterility of their parents’ upper-middle class lives. To say
that there is anything worthwhile left in the bureaucracy, cult of
professionalism and alienation that attends the university would be
tantamount to throwing your arms around a pile of bones.
So what’s at the root of these two positions?
1.) The acknowledgment that the public university is caught in a profit
model, not a public service model: it benefits from private capital in a
way unimaginable at its inception.
In the 1960’s the cost of a UC education, in inflation-adjusted dollars,
was about $1,500 per year or $6,000 for a four-year education.[1] Under
the November 2009 fee increases, students will be paying over $10,000
per year. So why does tuition cost eight times more while quality
plummets?
The answer is in appearance complicated, but at its root, simple:
tuition increases, especially in the post-2000 UC plan are largely the
effect of the need to pay back private investors. Instead of pushing
voters to pass state-backed bonds to help expand the university, instead
of putting political pressure on Sacramento to increase state funding,
the UC has lured private investment by issuing bonds that can be backed
by student tuition.[2] These bonds can be used to fund construction
projects such as the renovation of UCLA’s Pauley Pavillion sports center
or the new Police Station. Jobs can go to private contractors, who do
not necessarily use union labor.
Whereas state funds must go towards education, tuition is more flexible
in how it can be used. In case the new projects (a new cafe, for example
or a new law building) don’t immediately (or ever) turn a profit, the UC
can always raise tuition to pay back the interest on its bonds. Because
investors know that the UC can always raise tuition and have pledged all
tuition in the event of default, it is a “safe” investment for their
capital.
2.) Because the university fails to put sufficient political pressure on
voters and the state, educational cuts appear as nothing more than
necessary evils, the result of an all-around belt tightening. Therefore,
in its turn towards private capital, the university, now more than ever,
is failing on its promise to be a public service. With tuition money
pledged to investors and dwindling state funds, it lays off workers,
reduces services, and especially disadvantages students of color and
working class students. Entering students who often cannot afford rising
tuition costs take out more loans, work longer hours or are forced to
drop out. Some of the prospective students from disadvantaged
backgrounds don’t apply or don’t get in when enrollment is lowered. The
UC reduces services that would help people attend school such as
childcare, work-study and cultural programs.
The university has to be remade to abandon the profit model and become a
public service with a truly universal scope. The “universal” mission of
higher education so far extends only to those willing to suffer through
boring high school classes, are good at hiding their drug use, cheating
and disinterest, and be willing to go into massive debt for a stake in
the economic lottery and the promise of a decent living. True equality
of opportunity doesn’t mean allowing for better access to a workforce
that demands some succeed while others live in poverty.
However, the failure of equal opportunity starts at the K-12 level, as
public schools in working class neighborhoods are underfunded, since the
tax base is not the same as in your suburban neighborhood across town.
The university is just the last part of the slide-off in equal
opportunity.
3.) What I would emphasize, that I think both the pro-university and
anti-university camps have missed is this:
The university’s promise of equal opportunity is not enough, but the
fundamental promise of equal opportunity promoted by the university
should not be abandoned.
To simply say “destroy the university” reduces the social need for
education to a naive catch-all phrase. It is important to rage against
this specter of ivy covered majesty, but it cannot be done at the
expense of what is liberating about the promise of universal education
and the equal distribution of knowledge. On the other hand, to assume
that we should preserve a university that funnels students into unequal
standards of living is pernicious. Complicity with economic disparity
masquerades under the empty slogan of “equal opportunity.” Suppose we
repealed all the tuition hikes, reinstated all the classes and cut
library hours, got back work-study and ended worker furloughs. Suppose
we even reduced costs to 1960’s levels. Would we be victorious? Yes, if
by victory we mean making life more tolerable. But, more emphatically,
no, if what we mean is creating a more egalitarian society, where
education does not determine economic success.
Instead, the promise of education for all must be radicalized, made a
universal demand that strikes at the core of the economic structure:
We call for a university that cares nothing for the worth of what you
have done before and has no bearing on your worth in society afterwards.
A free university, devoted to universal education.
Therefore, the radical demand we make of the university appears as the
most innocuous: since you cannot fulfill your own vision of universal
education, we will do it for you and at your expense. Since you cannot
use education as a means of liberating people, all people, from
inequalities of wealth, class and status, we will take on this task.
Since you exclude people from education based on the circumstances of
birth, class, gender and race, we will allow everyone to join. Since
your alchemy reduces knowledge and skills into the base metal of a
person’s profitability, we will destroy the link between education and
worth. We will burn your degrees, the records of licenses acquired,
classes taken, scores received, grades inked on a whim.
This new university is impossible for capitalism to realize. Therefore,
we should not ask for the university to be destroyed, nor for it to be
preserved. We should not ask it for anything. We should ask ourselves,
and each other to take control of these universities, collectively, so
that education can begin. We should use this chance to ensure that there
are no more job talks, no more shitty lectures to attend, and that the
university’s degrees, and the little letters they would place after your
name mean nothing more than the ashes left after a forest fire.
While we do not believe in making demands to the University, like a dog
waiting at the table for the scraps of the overfed, we do want to
explain why we are fighting and what we hope to accomplish. Nor do we
form an organized “movement” or claim to make these demands on the
behalf of others, although we do expect that a great number of students
and workers in the UC system and the larger sphere of public education
will share some of our goals, while those invested in the current system
of domination will share none of them.
These demands are impossible not in the sense that they cannot be
realized, but rather that the current system would come undone if it did
realize them. A brief list of impossible demands for this world.
organizing. We are the crisis!
larger economic structures and the impact of cut-backs on low-income
people and people of color.
organization, and economic structure:
absolute, free education for all, regardless of so-called
“qualifications,” test scores, race, class, gender or orientation.
present, certain universities, such as UCLA, only recognize a certain
space and time (Kerkhoff, from 12 to 1pm) as a “free speech zone.”
are issued to private investors, backed with student tuition, and used
to fuel unnecessary construction projects. An immediate halt on all
construction and issuance of bonds until such transparency becomes a
reality. Default on all bond payments until educational and workforce
goals are met.
compensation is $454,916 and is happy to issue bonds to fund police
stations and sports arena renovations while cutting back library
services, course offerings and putting employees on furlough.
students, workers and staff of the UC neither choose them nor endorse
them.
campus. The removal of military recruiters and the entire war apparatus
from the university.
so-called level of education. We demand education for those without
“qualifications” or the means to afford the ridiculous costs of tuition
and we demand social and economic viability for those without degrees.
machine, developing new technologies of destruction, and breeding the
future’s managers, bureaucrats and careerists. Education for social
good: No practical education!
internationally and in the US, and especially those in Vienna, UCSC, UC
Berkeley CS Fullerton, CS Fresno who are fighting the commodification of
education and the transformation of universities into business
enterprises for private investors and money-hungry administrators.
are fighting to achieve meaning and autonomy in their lives.
Demand nothing,
Occupy everything.
Â
[1] California Progress Report
www.californiaprogressreport.com
[2] Anyone who has taken even a cursory glance at Bob Meister’s “They
Pledged Your Tuition” or “UC on Wall Street” will not fail to be
convinced by the role private capital plays in today’s public
university.