Archive for category: Education
If political pressure and desperate pleading with administrators could fix the crisis in American academia, it would be fixed already. Instead, transforming the university will require academics to do something we’re notoriously bad at: stop working.
A graduate student chants slogans and marches during a protest at the University of California, Irvine. (Paul Bersebach / Digital First Media / Orange County Register via Getty Images)
The American university is in a state of crisis, and everybody knows it.
Students pay increasingly exorbitant tuition fees, relying on loans with usurious interest rates, for classes taught by increasingly stressed and underpaid adjuncts and graduate workers. According to a report by the Service Employees International Union’s Adjunct Action, an adjunct in Boston would need to teach seventeen to twenty-four courses a year simply to make ends meet. Meanwhile, graduate workers get by on small stipends while producing cutting-edge research and teaching courses, hoping this will lead to a tenure-track position. But these have become rare, with the majority of faculty now contingent.
Even the fortunate few grad students who do make it through the gauntlet onto the tenure track face serious challenges. On top of high expectations for research and teaching, they are burdened with significant service work on committees and in administration. This eats away at the time they might otherwise devote to both students and their own families — families often delayed, disrupted, or uprooted by the job search process. As for tenured faculty, many can only receive a raise via an “outside offer” from another institution, which can be difficult to obtain in the current job market.
While the specifics vary between institutions and disciplines, the broad characterization of academia in crisis applies across them. Virtually everyone in academia is in a serious bind, and virtually everyone stands to benefit from radical change.
To effect change on the scale necessary to address the crisis, the standard strategies simply won’t work. We know because they’ve been tried relentlessly: if political pressure, internal pleading, or op-eds could fix this, they already would have. The university crisis is one of power as much as resources. There is more than enough need for faculty — student populations have been growing, not shrinking. But budget priorities at many large, four-year institutions have shifted to constructing elaborate new buildings to impress funders and attract students.
In order to challenge power relations in the university enough to spur transformation, academics need to strike.
The mere threat of strikes has won significant concessions at individual institutions. At my own institution, Rutgers, strike threats in 2019 achieved greater pay equity and raises for graduate-level workers. A recent strike authorization at Howard University also won pay raises for contingent faculty. Unlike political pressure or advocacy alone, a strike cannot be met with half-measures or distractions. Because they disrupt business as usual and force negotiations, strikes shift the conversation onto workers’ terms, allowing workers rather than administrators to determine what redress is enough.
To truly transform higher education with strikes, academics will need to collaborate across institutions. A national crisis demands a national response. Individual strikes can improve adjunct pay, but they can’t fix the adjunct crisis or reshape the university governance structures limiting the demands workers can make. Coordinated strike action, on the other hand, has the potential to force change across institutions, halting and reversing the current race to the bottom.
Even if individual strikes can accomplish more than they have so far, they will likely improve outcomes only at wealthier institutions. State universities and community colleges are suffering from a severe long-term decrease in government funding. This reflects the preferences of politicians rather than the public, some 62 percent of whom support increased funding for community colleges. Broad collective action can mobilize this majority against austerity-minded statehouses. Coordinated timing and communication efforts, up to and including a potential general strike in the future, could overwhelm anti-worker forces within universities and build opposition to them beyond their walls.
Academics are in a strong position to coordinate collective action in multiple workplaces at once. We attend conferences multiple times a year, have strong working and personal relationships across institutions, and share a sense of group consciousness and experience. In my discipline, history, the mood among graduate students at conferences is similar to that of some of the eighteenth-century sailors I study: comrades brought together by inevitable doom, whispering tales of friends lost after three harrowing years on the job market. It is time for a mutiny.
By shifting us away from individual despair toward collective hope and action, strikes can turn widespread sympathy among academic workers into powerful solidarity. Collective action can utilize and strengthen existing interinstitutional ties, while extending them across disciplines to further empower labor within universities. Support and foundations for this kind of collaboration, such as the recently-created Higher Education Labor United, already exist.
Striking to save the university will also require collaboration within institutions.
Tenured faculty’s importance and power is a crucial asset in any confrontation with administration. Larger bargaining units are an important step toward making this happen: if exploiting adjuncts or graduate workers means risking a strike by all faculty, it will become that much more difficult for administrators to do so.
Tenured faculty make valiant efforts to help their own graduate students, but these by their nature cannot solve the broader problem we face. By organizing and supporting strike efforts, sympathetic tenured faculty can help graduate students transform the current Thunderdome job market rather than compete better in it. But it’s important that tenured faculty not participate out of sympathy alone: collective action will also help them address their own significant grievances, such as heavy service loads and a lack of raises or cost-of-living increases.
The rule of thumb is that the more university workers united in struggle, the less capable the administration is of dismissing their demands. For that reason, faculty should collaborate with other university workers, like dining and facilities workers, to build power and address inequality within our institutions.
This kind of solidarity can be at the core of a new vision of the university. The academic crisis is only one face of broader economic and social trends affecting all workers, from increasing precarity to short-term institutional thinking to financialization. For rideshare drivers facing legislative campaigns to keep them from unionizing, perhaps academics’ concerns about adjunctification, science’s postdoc problem, or the death of the humanities may ring hollow. But they don’t have to if we reframe the fight to save the university as part and parcel of the fight for broader economic justice.
Universities can be worker-governed hubs for organizing in their communities. They can steer public discourse and knowledge creation toward the goals of the public rather than school donors and society’s wealthy minority more generally. Academic workers can fight to stop student debt, train organizers rather than managers, and challenge the legitimacy of hierarchies in our writing and lecturing. Many academics already do.
This renewed and expanded vision of the university has the potential to be both popular and powerful. Achieving it together requires us to do something we are notoriously bad at: stop working.
It is no mystery why Democrats want to push student loan forgiveness. The college-educated elite is today’s Democratic Party’s base. That’s why Joe Biden ran on the campaign promise of forgiving their student loan debt. (And like nearly all of his campaign promises he never had any intention of actually keeping that promise.) Basically student More
The post Student Loan Forgiveness is not a Working Class Priority appeared first on CounterPunch.org.
Content Warning: This essay focuses on a social justice movement and therefore discusses police violence against black people, sexual assault, and self-defense against the police in the context of protests.
This essay is part one of two pieces Irruptions will be releasing regarding the Fall 2021 anti-FIJI protests in Lincoln, Nebraska. This is a continuation of our work from the Summer of 2020, in which we examined the correlation between the arrival of activist leadership onto protest scenes and the subsequent dissipation of political energy within those protests. This pattern has now repeated itself on UNL’s campus in the wake of what appears to be another successfully defeated movement. Emphasizing the importance of study for those engaged in political action, we aim to offer a lens by which to understand this cycle of defeat in which people in Lincoln are trapped.
Here in Part One, we record the trajectory of the anti-FIJI protests that occurred in Lincoln and draw a few conclusions with the goal of challenging the hegemony of middle-class activism in this city. In Part Two, we will further develop aspects of the following analysis to explore the interactions of class, race, and gender within the crowds throughout the protests. Importantly, some vital events are being elided in Part One because they require deeper analysis in Part Two.
Across both parts, we aim to demonstrate the following theses:
1) Many people in Lincoln wish to do more than submit themselves to institutional reformism in response to violence, but they are always already countered by an entrenched counterinsurgency in the form of a clique of middle-class activists.
2) Lincoln’s middle-class activists alienate more militant elements from protests by cultivating atmospheres of suspicion and distrust, thereby discouraging direct action.
3) Speech-giving, petitioning, scheduling meetings with people in power, and “calling your friends out” (these being the endlessly recycled tactics deployed by the middle-class activist clique) ultimately alienate protest attendees and are the primary reason for the chronic dwindling of every movement in Lincoln.
4) The various police agencies in Lincoln rely on middle-class activism as part of their highly effective “get scarce” approach to counterinsurgency.
What follows is a synthesis of, on the one hand, a timeline of events that occurred in Lincoln and, on the other, our analysis of the forces at play in line with the above theses. But first, we must clarify one of our terms.
What Is Middle-Class Activism?
What we lay out in this section considers events through a primarily class-based lens, though the broader analysis will also consider the operations of other identity categories in the dynamics of the anti-FIJI protests (particularly in Part Two). We adopt this class-based lens because we believe that class allegiances and property relations are a primary force at play in the disarticulation of movements in Lincoln.
For the purpose of this essay, we define middle-class activism as follows: A political disposition which emphasizes institutional power as the exclusive means by which to create social change. Middle-class activism can be wielded by people from a variety of social backgrounds, including working-class ones. A person participates in middle-class activism when their attitudes and strategies regarding social change reflect a petty-bourgeois class interest.
Lincoln “organizers” can’t even run a campaign to call out a literal rapist. Why are we listening to these people? https://t.co/e3ZcHSlwDs
— Irruptions (@IrruptionsNE) September 1, 2021
Middle-class activism protects the interests and property of the powerful. This effect derives from its core assumptions: 1) that corporate and state institutions are capable of rendering “justice” if the oppressed can obtain a voice in the halls of power, and 2) that any direct attacks on corporate and state institutions will make these entities less likely to listen to the demands of the oppressed or admit them into positions of power. At its core, therefore, the logic of middle-class activism rests on the hope that the oppressed can gain entry into the system as it currently exists. Of course, middle-class activists tend to think they are the best candidates for this elevation to power. Therefore, they defend the existing property relations from which they hope to benefit.
These assumptions come into conflict with the historied proletarian impulse toward property destruction. Those who have no hope of and/or do not aspire to join the mythical, propertied middle-class feel no qualms about breaking a window or two if it strikes enough fear in the hearts of landowners to improve the conditions of life. Because many people (whatever their class position) understand that oppression itself is rooted in the present social conditions, they do not see these conditions as aspirations to be guarded, but rather as the very vehicles of their oppression.
This contradiction between middle-class activism and proletarian liberation continually arises within social movements both in Lincoln and abroad.
Night One: Autonomous Action in Lincoln, Nebraska
On Tuesday, August 24th, the University of Nebraska—Lincoln (UNL) was entering its second day of classes. Throughout the day, allegations spread that a female undergraduate student had been violently raped the night before at the Phi Gamma Delta (colloquially known as “FIJI”) fraternity house on campus. FIJI was already considered by students to be a bastion of rapists among the Greek houses. A brief history of FIJI includes more than fourteen allegations of rape on the property since 2017, repeated suspensions and probations by the university, and a vocal right-wing political orientation.
Within hours of the allegations spreading among undergraduate students, calls were circulating within local social media ecosystems for both the alleged rapist and the house itself to be expelled from UNL.
On the same night as the allegations had proliferated, a demonstration was called outside the fraternity house. No clear leaders emerged in the run-up to the protest, and, as the night set, a crowd of approximately one thousand assembled.
At first, the protest was highly decentralized and autonomous. The crowd positioned itself directly in front of the FIJI house, with those leading chants rotating in and out from the front. Whoever was leading chants at a given point stood on a stout wall that bordered the fraternity’s lawn, in close proximity to the line of half a dozen UNL police guarding the fraternity house just beyond the wall.
Objects were thrown at the house, and the police perimeter was violated. These actions were met with mixed responses from the crowd, divided between encouragement and remonstrations to “be peaceful.” When the perimeter of the lawn was breached by a protestor, they were ejected from the area by police, but not arrested.
At some point, a megaphone appeared. This changed the tenor of the demonstration, immediately drawing the focus of the crowd to individual speakers on the wall. Convergent with this development, a prominent Lincoln activist who leads the Black Leaders Movement (hereafter referred to as BLM, not to be confused with “Black Lives Matter”) arrived and became the primary possessor of the megaphone. This particular activist appeared repeatedly as a counter-insurgent force last year and has been previously mentioned in our analyses of the George Floyd Rebellion and its subsequent disarticulation. Immediately upon the arrival of this BLM activist, the autonomy of the crowd became overshadowed by peace-policing as the megaphone began to dictate the necessity of a “peaceful protest.”
Analysis of Night One
Just as the George Floyd Rebellion revealed, the unfolding of the first night of anti-FIJI protests demonstrates that, when people feel empowered to respond to structural violence in their communities, they do so. The inclination of many in the crowd on August 24th was to attack the house. They expressed this by lobbing projectiles toward the structure where the alleged rapist had been harbored. Moreover, they demonstrated courage in the face of police repression, openly defying the cops’ attempts to keep them off the lawn. At this point, the crowd was testing the waters, building their courage, seeing how far they could push things. What would they have accomplished if they had been allowed to continue along this course?
An approximate answer may have played out in nearby Iowa City, where, on August 31st, thousands got into the streets to protest an alleged rape at another FIJI fraternity on the University of Iowa campus. The FIJI house was graffitied with prominent tags of “RAPISTS” on the front of the house. Windows were shattered, and several cars were overturned and damaged by the crowd. Additionally, it is our understanding that an entrance to the house was breached by individuals and the interior was damaged.
Here is a Twitter thread of some of the raw footage captured at the Protest outside of the Phi Gamma Delta (Fiji) house at the University of Nebraska Lincoln. pic.twitter.com/G1nNAtzkkt
— CDmedia (@c_dmedia) August 25, 2021
The difference between Lincoln and Iowa City is that the apparatuses of liberal, middle-class activism were slower to activate in the latter city. This tells us that middle-class activism here in Lincoln is always at the ready to quell unrest. As such, the forces of middle-class activism are the frontline of counterinsurgency, which people must find ways to preemptively circumvent if they wish to exercise their autonomy.
As a postscript to this section, we will mention that a struggle over the megaphone occurred between the activists and a black man from the crowd, which concluded with the man being arrested by the police to the cheers of the activists. We find this incident to be highly disturbing as well as indicative of the relationship between middle-class activism and the police. We will explore this relationship more fully in Part Two.
Nights Two and Three: Passivity Takes the Reins
Going into the second night of protests (Wednesday, August 25th), the middle-class activists had solidified their control. The process resembled the well-oiled machine that was witnessed during the previous summer: a demonstration was called; a peaceful, police-escorted march of pre-determined chants on silent, traffic-free campus streets ensued; more chants were performed outside the fraternity house; and roughly two hours of aimless speaking by the self-proclaimed “revolutionary” BLM activist were delivered through the megaphone.
Unapproved displays of frustration, even those as simple as chucking a water bottle towards the FIJI house, were now met with the swift movement of police towards the point of origin and immediate disapproval from the activists who demanded “respect for the survivor”—according to their definition of “respectful behavior,” of course.
New video on recent events in Lincoln, NE!
Protests continue tonight at 8pm at Nebraska Union. #ShutdownFiji
*Repost from Instagram* pic.twitter.com/yIXaLWr4EK
— Midwest People’s History (@MPHProject) August 31, 2021
Testimony became the primary mode of protest at this point. Survivors (pre-selected by the activists) stepped up to recount their traumas for the crowd and demand that something be done by university administration. During intermissions in the speeches, the activist-leaders would address the crowd (who had just born witness to some of the worst violences inflicted upon their peers), and tell people that the solutions were petitions, emails, and adding one another on Snapchat to build the movement.
More of the same (though without even so much as a police-escorted march this time) followed on the third night (Thursday, August 26th).
Analysis of Nights Two and Three
Truly, we were shocked by the rapidity with which the middle-class activists stifled the anti-FIJI uprising. The past year and a half had been practice. Every time a movement popped up, middle-class activists—most prolifically the aforementioned BLM founder—would show up and take control. The assumption of control by any member of the middle-class activist clique was inevitably accompanied by the reign of megaphones and police escorts. Wherever they appeared, protestors were told to look out for “outside agitators” and “clout-chasers,” so that suspicious eyes were suddenly upon anyone who looked as though they were about to do anything at all.
The pestilential atmosphere enforced by these activists negated any potential for camaraderie within the crowd. Like cult leaders, the activists positioned themselves as the only ones you can trust, the only ones who are looking out for you, warning the crowd to beware the evil “agitators” who “want to lead you astray.”
The equivocation between, on the one hand, attempts by the crowd to damage the alleged rapist’s property and, on the other, disrespect to the person who was violated at this same property underscores that these activists are coercing crowds into institutional reform as the be-all, end-all. Not even the hackneyed “diversity of tactics” compromise (which operates mostly as an excuse for those who do not want to risk anything to avoid doing so) can be reached when the activists unilaterally ensnare any potential action in these institutional binds.
We propose that, in these so-called safe spaces of civility and high-roadism, where people’s traumas are trotted out like a list of dangers from which the activists “are here to save you,” many felt alienated, disengaged, and alone. Many felt crushed by the weight of the violence of this world and the seeming impossibility of doing anything more than petitioning the powerful to please stop.
Perhaps, this is a better explanation for why these protests repeatedly fizzle out and die. This opposed to the tired script produced by the activists that “people just aren’t committed enough.”
Night Four: The Activists Protect the Police
Night four (Friday, August 27th) was marked by more pacified liberal “action,” now on the steps of the Student Union and away from the fraternity. The crowd had dwindled. The old pattern was strictly maintained: There were calls for officials to be held accountable, organized speeches, calls for petition-signing, and no action by the crowd allowed other than the repetitious chants doled out by the activists.
University of Nebraska-Lincoln students form a protest against the fraternity “Fiji” for a member allegedly raping a student on the first day of school! pic.twitter.com/aNVk3EkN1O
— 🥀_Imposter_🌹 (@Imposter_Edits) August 25, 2021
Toward the end of the night, on O Street (a major street near UNL’s campus), Lincoln Police performed a traffic stop on a black man for allegedly violating a traffic signal. As the stop unfolded, he was tazed by the police. A crowd of passersby formed, and the nearby UNL protestors were alerted to the tazing. Not long after the UNL protestors arrived, people were in the streets, blocking cop cars from leaving and bringing their anger to bear against the police. Eventually, the police retreated in the face of the crowd’s anger, at which point the middle-class activists ordered everyone back onto the sidewalk with their megaphone and, eventually, made everyone go home.
Analysis of Night Four
This is another incident which we must elide in Part One so that we can attend to it more fully in Part Two. For now, let it be said that this eruption was the revival of spontaneous crowd solidarity, which, as will be shown below, was swiftly tamped down. Keep an eye on our blog for the more detailed analysis of this incident in Part Two.
Beyond Night Four: The Movement Defeated
Following the confrontation with police on O Street, the activists barely acknowledged the event. The activists, instead, resumed calling for the same type of actions as before, i.e., inaction. The crowd dwindled each subsequent night.
On Sunday, August 29th, news broke that a separate UNL fraternity, Sigma Chi, was placing itself on suspension for a rape that was reported internally. Regardless, the demonstration of Monday, August 30th, was the smallest yet, numbering barely one hundred. The protesters no longer gathered in front of the FIJI house. They were, instead, moved to the other side of the Student Union, entirely out of sight of the fraternity. The demonstration consisted of a candlelight vigil, with more speeches from activists and survivors, followed by a silent march on the traffic-less streets of the campus. The frustration and fatigue of many protestors was palpable, even during the silent march, and several groups did not bother to return to the Union. It should be noted that several of the speech-givers and activists also did not participate in the march, but instead waited at the Union, prepared with their megaphone to funnel the crowd back into repeating the same-old set of chants when they returned.
On Monday, August 30th, only a small handful of protesters arrived at the Student Union, and the low turnout motivated the activists to move the event to a discussion on Zoom, the goals and details of which remain unclear.
On the afternoon of Tuesday, September 1st, the BLM activist who had assumed leadership of the protests posted on Facebook that all scheduled demonstrations were cancelled for the following two weeks (whether protests will resume remains to be seen). The justification given was that the organizers needed to regroup and perform self-care. This has so far been the end of anti-FIJI action in Lincoln. Although some parties attempted to resuscitate the movement following September 1st (using the same top-down, institution-oriented tactics), no significant actions have taken place since that date.
Also on September 1st, a letter surfaced on several social media pages, first appearing (from what we can tell) in a Facebook group for anti-FIJI organizing in Iowa City. This letter purported to be penned by survivors who denounced the cooptation of the Lincoln protests and the silencing of their anger. Although many on the Internet both in Lincoln and Iowa City expressed agreement with the letter’s sentiments, and another middle-class activist (who, previously, had labelled those who attempted to attack the FIJI house “reactionaries”) posted on Facebook an attempt at reflection in their role in stifling the movement, nothing more came of this letter.
Analysis of Night Five and After
The suppression by activists of the anti-police actions of August 27th emphasizes the questionable separation of police from the discussion of sexual violence that occurred on UNL’s campus. Moreover, it is especially confusing considering that the BLM activist who coopted the anti-FIJI movement began their career by imposing themself upon the local expression of the George Floyd Rebellion. Yet, this activist did not once, to our knowledge, mention the countless untested rape kits in police departments around the country. Neither did they draw the clear connection to the staggering rates of rape committed by police officers. No, they were more than happy to have the cops roaming with impunity through a crowd of young women, with no consideration for the fact that, as the protests thinned, the cops would have increasing opportunities to corner these people alone. Women are far from defenseless, but have we not seen what depravity the police are capable of one million times over?
Additionally, it bears mentioning that, despite another rape occurring on UNL’s campus within the same week—an incident that would have instigated full-on rioting in many places—we saw a continued diminishment of protest attendance in Lincoln. Although the middle-class activists continually whine that people are not committed enough to “doing the work,” we think this series of events paints a stark picture of how they are the very problem. Every protest they come to swiftly dies. The fact that they could not mobilize people around a second alleged rape shows, even by their own metrics, that they are not capable of anything other than destroying movements. These activists are the heart of counterinsurgency in Lincoln.
Protests against Fiji Fraternity in Iowa City have exploded, as many denounce their rampant sexual abuses of young women on and off campus. This follows a week of protests in Lincoln, NE against the same frat following the r*pe of a minor the first night of class. https://t.co/KEADTPgpev
— Vitalist International (@VitalistInt) September 1, 2021
Lastly, we turn our eye to the letter from survivors. Its appearance at the end of the campus’s protests should be taken as a clear diagnosis: Middle-class activism is not the Great Advocate of the Oppressed. Rather, it functions to funnel and silence people’s anger and to annihilate people’s autonomy. Middle-class activism not only implements hierarchical domination of professional activists over lay protestors, and not only does this imposition drive people away in the literal hundreds, but it leaves survivors of sexual assault and other marginalized people more vulnerable to violence because the activists have assured everybody that they are “taking care of it” in the halls of power, where nothing ever changes. Meanwhile, rapists prowl from dozens of fraternities and hundreds of dorm rooms and in every police department. The people who care, the people who are desperate for something, anything, to be done, those who keep coming to the activists because the activists have driven everybody else away—these people walk home from these protests, alone and disempowered, with predators all around them.
People could have built something. But, instead, they were told to sign a petition and go home.
Conclusion
We think the conclusion is clear: Middle-class activism cannot be abided. Any well-meaning liberal in Lincoln and abroad needs to think seriously about what it means to tell people that, when they are attacked, they cannot attack back; that their hurt and anger must be expressed through institutional channels only. Middle-class activism asks that people simply get used to dying while the speech-givers and the influencers jot down on their resumés that they did something, though it is never clear what.
We echo the letter that we published prior to this piece: Go around the forces of middle-class activism. When your autonomy is denied you, experiment with ways to enact it. You do not have to listen to megaphones. You do not have to listen when people tell you your reactions are wrong. The only thing that each of us must do is better equip ourselves to protect one another.
As they come to resemble corporations, universities increasing wield the kind of local power and influence that were once a hallmark of ruthless local employers in isolated company towns. Sociologist Davarian Baldwin calls this ominous trend the “rise of the UniverCity.”
The 1.25-million-square-foot USC Village residential complex in Los Angeles.
From New York’s Upper West Side to the South Side of Chicago, and from downtown Phoenix to the entirety of New Haven, universities are remaking American cities in their image.
In his new book In the Shadow of the Ivory Tower: How Universities Are Plundering Cities, Davarian L. Baldwin examines how urban universities are straying from their purported mission of educating students and fostering innovation for the common good. Instead, their activities are increasingly oriented toward capital extraction and accumulation — at the ultimate expense of working-class urban residents.
Davarian Baldwin is an urbanist, historian, and cultural critic. He is the Paul E. Raether Distinguished Professor of American Studies and founding director of the Smart Cities Lab at Trinity College. Jacobin’s Meagan Day spoke to Baldwin about the enormous and unequal impact universities have in the realms of employment, real estate, policing, and health care.
- Meagan Day
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In your book In the Shadow of the Ivory Tower, you compare university towns to company towns. You looked at New Haven, Hartford, New York City, Chicago, and Phoenix for examples of this dynamic, though it’s hardly restricted to those places. How big of a footprint do schools have in these and other university cities?
- Davarian L. Baldwin
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Columbia and New York University (NYU) are two of the biggest landholders on the island of Manhattan — so large that, at one point, they were actually only surpassed by the Catholic Church. University of Southern California (USC) is the largest private employer in Los Angeles County. The University of Chicago fields one of the largest private security forces in the world, with jurisdiction over fifty thousand nonstudent residents on the city’s south side. Yale University and its hospital make up one of New Haven’s largest landholders, and Yale deploys a private armed security force with policing jurisdiction over the entire city.
So the physical and economic footprint can’t be overstated. But I also think about footprint in terms of influence. The political authority of Columbia in West Harlem, NYU in Greenwich Village, Washington University in St. Louis, and Arizona State University (ASU) in downtown Phoenix are astounding. They have the ability to either flout or rewrite zoning laws and to shelter millions of public dollars on campus acres. Ultimately, we are witnessing higher education’s gaining control over not just economic development but also urban governance, a process I call the rise of “UniverCities.”
- Meagan Day
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The trade-off for that kind of influence is supposedly that universities make cities vibrant places to live. What kinds of changes come with university expansion? Who enjoys them, and who misses out?
- Davarian L. Baldwin
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University development often involves commercial corridors like University of Chicago’s Harper Court, or USC Village, or the Shops at Yale. We can expect new construction and facilities like the gleaming towers of St. Louis’s Cortex development, or Columbia’s Manhattanville campus, or the glittering glass and steel that we see in the proposed partnership between Virginia Tech and Amazon in Northern Virginia.
We are witnessing higher education’s gaining control over not just economic development but also urban governance.
Some of the change is undeniably worth celebrating, such as when the long-standing Pittsburgh Technology Center actually cleaned up a brownfield that had been polluted by a former steel company. And there’s no question that universities bring people and ideas together and promote innovation.
But there’s also a cost for those living in the shadows of these ivory tower developments. These expansions raise housing costs and displace residents in neighborhoods that are largely filled with working-class people of color. Campus police forces surveil and profile those same residents and are rarely held to public account. Higher education also has broad control over a city’s labor force, which it uses to lower wage ceilings and suppress collective bargaining efforts of low-wage support staff.
“Economic impact” is a phrase that universities love to use in their press releases. They talk about increasing prosperity by boosting local economies, raising housing values, and creating secondary enterprises. But we must ask: prosperity for whom? The retail price points are targeted toward the demographic that boosters hope will be drawn to these areas, not the existing residents. The job creation is often overstated, flying above the capacity of existing residents. And housing quickly becomes unaffordable for people who already live in the area.
For example, in the 2000s, Johns Hopkins University displaced 742 black families to make way for its mixed-use biotech park. The school now brags about the $36,000 housing subsidies they offer that will allow their workers to come back and purchase housing on the site, calling this “community engagement.” But the housing subsidy is precisely how gentrification is packaged at Johns Hopkins, because it underwrites inflated housing costs, which are unaffordable to previous residents who don’t happen to be employed by the university.
The subsidy is also not available to the lowest-wage workers, who are subcontracted and hence not direct employees. In this case and others, “community engagement” or “community development” is a misnomer, because the area is often never returned to the “community” that lived there before the campus development washed over the area.
- Meagan Day
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You observe that universities have, in many cities, “become the dominant employers, real estate holders, health-care providers, and even policing agents in major cities across the country.” Can you give us a brief overview of the problems with the way universities operate in each of these four capacities?
- Davarian L. Baldwin
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When it comes to land, higher education’s physical footprint is primarily tax-exempt. Meanwhile, more of the work done on campuses, in terms of research and development and even property management, is becoming for-profit. Revenue from research for private companies and the potential royalties that go back to the schools from IP (intellectual property) discoveries are all covered by tax abatement, because the work is done on campus. So, campuses have become wealthy knowledge factories, and a portion of that wealth comes from the tax-exempt status of land.
Campuses have become wealthy knowledge factories, and a portion of that wealth comes from the tax-exempt status of land.
Private enterprises know this. Eli Lilly at Princeton, State Farm Insurance at ASU — they do their business on campuses because it provides them a tax abatement and gives them a financial edge in their competitive markets. The real issue here is that the prosperity tied to universities is directly extracted from the taxes that would normally go to public services for cities, like secondary schools and public works. And then the residents eat the financial burden through inflated property taxes and increased rental costs.
University of Pennsylvania is a perfect example of this. It has a $15 billion endowment that’s tax-exempt, and it has property that is tax-exempt. Meanwhile, in the Philadelphia public schools, the walls are filled with asbestos. There’s a direct correlation between the maintenance upkeep that the public schools can do and the property taxes that do not come from the university. And then the university brags about its economic impact, bringing prosperity to the community.
As for labor, we need to talk about both graduate labor and low-wage labor. On the graduate side, you have these public-private contracts with companies like General Motors or Bombardier or Google or Western Digital. The company donates money, which underwrites cheap research and development for them by the brightest minds in the world. Companies would have to pay more for it if they directly employed the researchers, but as it stands, the labor gets written off as an educational cost. Meanwhile, if the research produces a lucrative discovery, schools keep 50 or sometimes 60 percent of royalties just because the work was performed on campus.
Low-wage labor is the primary form of employment at universities. We’re talking about groundskeepers, food service, support staff. In many cases, they don’t receive a living wage and are employed on a nine-month cycle, which also leaves their families without year-round health benefits. Increasingly, these workers are starting to unionize, and they’re winning contracts that are much better than what nonunion workers get. But over time, universities are shifting their employment strategies away from directly employing workers to hiring subcontractors, where workers don’t benefit from those union contracts. Subcontracting is a powerful way to sidestep negotiated benefits and wages.
Now, let’s talk about health care. University hospitals are tax-exempt, largely in exchange for offering indigent care. But in real time, these universities are closing down community clinics and ramping up boutique high-profile units specializing in cancer research and plastic surgery. Meanwhile, the hospitals make it hard to find out about the indigent care subsidies and services they do have, since it’s not profitable.
Low-wage labor is the primary form of employment at universities.
In 2006, in Chicago, Damian Turner suffered from a gunshot wound just blocks away from the extremely prosperous U Chicago hospital. But they didn’t have Level 1 trauma services. So he had to be transferred eight miles away to another hospital, and on the way, he died. Residents, community activists, and students protested for years, and now there is a Level 1 trauma center at the U Chicago hospital. But that was only because of protests, direct action, and campaigning, and because the optics were just so bad.
Low-wage workers in these neighborhoods often find that they can’t access the care they need. Or they discover that they can’t afford it, even in cases where they work for the school and get their health care from the school. So they go into debt, and then the institution will garnish checks and even pursue liens on homes. And again, the hospitals are being underwritten by subsidies contingent on providing public services for the community, which they are not upholding.
University of Chicago police officers on campus. (Chicago Maroon via Twitter)
Finally, there’s policing. A full 75 percent of schools have campus police. Nearly all carry guns. Nine out of ten have arrest and patrol jurisdiction off the main campus. The claim is that this is a display of their public service, their willingness to pitch in for public safety. But let’s look at the reality of campus policing. The biggest problems on campuses are sexual violence and substance abuse, and campus police are utter failures in policing those crimes. What school wants to publicize that they have a campus full of white criminals? Instead, they police the perimeter neighborhoods around the campus to assuage parental and investor anxiety about being in these urban locales.
In reality, increasing public safety in surrounding neighborhoods would mean food security, housing security, trauma care, and other things that universities are actually disrupting rather than ensuring. Campus police do not meet the safety needs of neighboring communities, because that’s not their goal. Their goal is to protect the school brand by keeping silent about campus crime and ensuring that residents will behave in accordance with the university’s interests. These practices often set the table for expansion that will ultimately result in displacement of those same residents.
You basically have private police forces with no public accountability. The result is a two-tier policing system whereby a student and a resident can commit the same infraction, but the student goes to see the dean and the resident goes through the criminal justice system.
- Meagan Day
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You write that, “In times of meager state funding, colleges and universities have had to find new ways to shore up their fiscal stability. Urban development is higher education’s latest economic growth strategy.” Your book emphasizes that there is no ideal past when the university was a purely benevolent presence. Still, something happened to send the modern university careening in this direction. What developments led us here?
- Davarian L. Baldwin
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In many ways, what we call the corporatization of the university, or the neoliberal turn, was a response to powerful social movements from the liberation era of the 1960s, where students and communities came together to reimagine the university as a community institution. Across the country, students and residents fought for tuition-free college, against gentrification and displacement, and for curriculum that would be of political and practical use to working-class people of color. These social movements were trying to make both public and private higher education beholden to the communities in which they were embedded.
Campus police do not meet the safety needs of neighboring communities, because that’s not their goal. Their goal is to protect the school brand.
The backlash saw the shift of public dollars to private service providers. This includes the funding of individual students as consumers in the Higher Education Act of 1965, which created the private loan market instead of directly funding schools and led to a spiral of individual debt. It also caused schools to compete with one another over students by presenting campuses as amenities packages, as well as ramping up out-of-state and international student targets at a higher tuition price point.
Additionally, for the last three decades, and especially after the Great Recession, we have seen education subject to state austerity measures. So state expenditures have plummeted from covering about 60 or 70 percent of a school’s annual budget to now about 20 or 30 percent. And, let’s be clear, both public and private schools receive public money, so both saw no choice but to raise tuition and diversify their revenue streams — or, as they say, become “entrepreneurial.”
Another aspect of these developments is the interest convergence in the 1990s, when the children of suburban sprawl, young professionals, and empty nesters began to seek out a more urban experience. City leaders started competing with one another to attract the tax base and consumer dollars of this new urban demographic.
These new residents wanted a particular urban experience: coffee shops; museums; fully wired, urban density. They associated an urban experience with university life. But schools had become bunkered in educational fortresses, creating an economic boundary between themselves and what was at that time called the “urban crisis.” They were islands of prosperity in seas of poverty. And so a lot of schools actually lacked the amenities that were being associated with this desirable urban environment.
The interests of university and city leaders converged, and the college was reimagined as a palatable and profitable version of a safe urban experience. From there, they began to turn the city into a campus.
- Meagan Day
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Universities are broadly understood to exist for the purpose of education. Your book questions that premise. To what extent has education been supplanted as the primary mission of the modern university, and what has replaced it?
- Davarian L. Baldwin
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One of the key reasons people have a hard time seeing the realities of higher education is the myth of the schoolhouse. We still hold on to the idea that campuses are purely sites of learning, just classrooms and educational laboratories. Now, to be sure, teaching and learning still happen, and schools still get a lot of revenue from the tuition transaction. But tuition, at this point, is not a simple payment-for-service model. Instead, it’s a $1.5 trillion debt market, which enslaves not just current and former students but also a larger swath of the public due to inflated credentialization and the collapse of a healthy job market with living wages and benefits.
The purpose of this activity is not education, it’s capital extraction.
On top of that, tuition is increasingly becoming just one part of the financial apparatus. We have to look at ballooning administrative costs, which have nothing to do with teaching and are focused much more on capital extraction. We’re talking about the real estate, the university foundation, the development office, the office of technology transfer, the sports division, the police department — all of these noneducational divisions that are premised largely on labor and land control.
There are companies that solely focus on university-industry development. They make all their money on what they call “mixed-use innovation districts” and “knowledge communities.” It’s under that banner that urban neighborhoods are transformed to optimize value capture. Local governments, developers, and universities all reap rewards by turning campuses and their surroundings into a mix of luxury housing, storefronts, classrooms, and laboratories, all patrolled and regulated by private security with public authority, and covered by tax shelters of educational purpose.
The purpose of this activity is not education, it’s capital extraction. And meanwhile, long-term residents have their noses pressed up to the glass, gazing in awe at these cathedrals of prosperity, only let on to the campuses to serve the food and clean the floors. But another university is possible!

Students wearing protective masks talk on campus on the first day of classes at Ohio State University in Columbus, Ohio, on August 25, 2020. | Ty Wright/Bloomberg via Getty Images
Higher education may not be doomed, but it’s in trouble.
The pandemic hit almost every industry hard, but few were hit as hard as higher education.
Times were already tough for many American universities, mostly because of declining enrollment numbers and weakening financial support from state governments. The pandemic accelerated these trends and forced colleges — especially smaller private colleges and a ton of midlevel state schools — to gut their budgets and lay off workers to offset revenue losses.
As we emerge from this pandemic, it’s worth asking what will become of higher education in America. And if the situation is as dire as it appears, should students — and parents — seriously rethink the value of college?
To get some answers, I reached out to Kevin Carey, who covers higher education for the New York Times, to talk about the state of American colleges. We discuss the student debt crisis, why the pandemic is impacting institutions in wildly disparate ways, what kinds of schools are facing extinction, and if he thinks the future of higher ed in America will look anything like its past.
A lightly edited transcript of our conversation follows.
Sean Illing
Is there an actual crisis in American higher education?
Kevin Carey
Parts of it are facing a crisis. It’s an enormously diverse system with lots of institutions serving different people and goals. If you’re a wealthy university that enrolls wealthy students, times are still pretty great. If you’re a small private college with a small endowment that lives year to year on tuition, these are really tough times. If you’re one of those mid-tier public universities, particularly in states that have pulled back on funding, things are bad.
New undergraduate enrollment is down by about a million and a half students from the peak in the late aughts, which was a high-water mark. We’ve seen income growth remain pretty stagnant for everyone except the well-off, and there just aren’t as many students, and families don’t have enough money to pay tuition. There’s been a real sea change in social attitudes toward debt, and people are (rightly) worried about it.
So, yeah, from a pure business standpoint, a lot of colleges are having a hard time making the numbers add up — and that will continue to get worse.
Sean Illing
What about larger, more prestigious public universities in states that value higher education?
Kevin Carey
They have problems, but public universities in states that support higher education are doing better. Historically, support for higher education has been a fairly bipartisan or nonpartisan thing in this country. But that’s changed as the electorate has been bifurcated along education and class lines.
You can see this after the Great Recession. That was an enormous hit to state budgets. Every state cut funding to its higher education system; one, because they didn’t have as much money, and two, because in recessions, states always disproportionately cut university budgets because universities can raise prices, whereas K-12 schools and prisons can’t. The difference is that some states — like New York and California — put money back into the system as their budgets recovered. Other states, like Louisiana or Pennsylvania, that historically have done a bad job of funding higher ed didn’t put money back in, and those are places that are really struggling.
Sean Illing
Was the pandemic a bigger hit on higher ed than the Great Recession?
Kevin Carey
We really don’t know yet. The effects of the Great Recession unfolded over the course of five years or so, mostly because the public revenues didn’t snap back for a long time. Traditionally, college enrollment is kind of cyclical. People get laid off and then they’ll go back to get a credential in order to improve their value in the labor market and also because they have the time.
The pandemic recession was different because it was so fast and so severe, but also weird and unique and it happened so fast. People were going back to school when they were’t ready to go back, and so most of it was online. It was a mess. But things definitely look bad for a lot of colleges right now since enrollment is declining.
Sean Illing
There are lots of private colleges that are in really dire straits. How many do you think are facing extinction?
Kevin Carey
It’s a good question. Coming up with a precise number is hard, but it’s not a tiny number. Just based on publicly available financial information, you can see that plenty of schools are in danger of going out of business in the next five years or so. Even in the years leading up the pandemic, there has been a steady drip of small private colleges just going bankrupt.
A lot of these schools have actually weathered the last year better than I would’ve expected. Overall employment in the higher education sector is down about 15 percent, so I think a lot of institutions took the crisis as an opportunity to lay off people they probably wanted to lay off anyway. I hate to use the phrase “trimming fat” to describe people losing their jobs, but that’s what schools have done to reduce their labor costs.
They were also very aggressive about trying to get people back on campus last fall, even when it ran counter to the best interests of public health. But they live and die by enrollment, so they were very adamant about getting people back through the doors. Whether this has a permanent effect on enrollment, I think it’s a little hard to tell at this point.
Sean Illing
Does reducing “labor costs” basically mean firing teachers and gutting liberal arts or humanities programs?
Kevin Carey
We don’t have those kinds of numbers. Colleges weren’t spending that much money on these things to start with, because not that many students enroll in the humanities. Most of the enrollment is in business, the social sciences, education, and health. There aren’t that many history majors anymore, not like there used to be, anyway. You can hire a history teacher for nothing in the market now because it’s absolutely saturated with people that have the credentials to be college professors. The academic labor market was in a real crisis before the pandemic. Everything that’s happened in the last year has made it worse. I think the hiring will probably accelerate the trend to more contingent faculty, particularly if this big shift to online education continues.
Sean Illing
One thing I wonder about is whether the current model can last for much longer, especially in light of the student debt crisis. If people are continually forced to acquire mountains of debt in exchange for the promise of upward mobility, do you feel like we’re going to hit some kind of tipping point where the costs of a degree don’t match the market value and it’s just not feasible for non-wealthy people to attend college anymore? And if that happens, what becomes of higher education?
Kevin Carey
I think the tipping point is more on the institutional side. If people are no longer willing to pay money to certain kinds of colleges, then those colleges will decline and fail. But it’s not that they won’t go anywhere; it’s just that they just won’t go to those places.
The thing is, we have an enormously complicated and highly structured market where there are massive spaces you simply can’t enter without a degree, sometimes even by law. You can’t be a teacher without a degree. Every occupational licensure process is tied to the higher education system. Our entire health system works this way. If you want to be a nurse, you have to go to college. If you want to be part of the professional managerial class, if you want a well-compensated professional life, a stable professional life, you probably have to go to college. And you’re definitely more removed from an acute employment crisis in this economy if you have a college degree.
So I don’t think higher education is going away, but institutions will fail and the market will have to correct.
Sean Illing
How much of the turmoil in higher ed is due to the complete embrace of the business mode? So many universities have disinvested in teaching and turned college into a post-adolescent consumer experience. Is that a big part of the story for you?
Kevin Carey
Well, there’s only one real model of success in higher education: the academic city-state. It’s the global research university. Everybody wants to be the University of Michigan or something like that. Obviously there’s the Ivy League, but the Ivy League is such a strange and esoteric place. What you really want to be is a big, successful, prosperous institution that has all kinds of smart people and beautiful buildings and sports teams and grassy lawns and football games on Saturdays and social prestige and everyone makes enough money to have a nice little house where they can ride their bike to work. That’s the model of a successful university.
But this is very much a zero-sum game, and everyone’s trying to get there at the same time. There are only so many upper-middle-class students to pay full tuition to support your lazy river and your science center. So there can only be so many University of Michigans. I think a new report came out yesterday that says that private colleges now provide on average about a 54 percent discount against the published tuition price. And that number is going up every year. So they’ve just kind of exhausted their pricing power.
If universities play this game and lose, they end up in a tough spot. What we need, from a societal and policy standpoint, is most institutions not trying to be University of Michigan. There shouldn’t be 2,000 research universities in this country. What we need is probably like 300 great research universities and 1,700 universities that are mostly there for teaching. But if status is about research and teaching is just something that you do because you have to, and so therefore you do it as cheaply as possible with basically an indifference to quality, that’s not good for anyone. Including the institution. But that’s where we are right now.
Sean Illing
What do you think higher ed looks like in a decade? Does it even resemble its current form?
Kevin Carey
Lots of institutions that exist today will be gone. There will continue to be attrition and bankruptcy on the private side, probably mergers on the public side. Because almost all the institutions in the bottom half of the distribution of resources and prestige are going to face enormous challenges in terms of their cost structure and the related issues of declining enrollment and a decline in pricing power.
I suspect the long-term trend of more online students will continue as it has for many years. Even before the pandemic, 35 percent of college students were taking at least one online class, and something like 15 percent were totally online. That’s all going to continue. I think you have a relatively small number of institutions that will succeed at that at scale, but most of the colleges that exist now will still exist. Colleges are very resilient historically.
Sean Illing
At what point should students and parents seriously reconsider the value of higher education altogether?
Kevin Carey
I think they should think deeply about the value of all of their choices in higher education, because there’s an enormous amount of variance in value. Not all colleges are the same. They don’t charge the same amount of money, they don’t provide the same experience, and your odds of graduating are very different depending on what institution you enroll in.
I guess the last thing I’d say is that college has become very high-stakes both from a price standpoint and a value standpoint. So no one should wait to think hard about the value of higher education. The moment is now to take a hard look at all of the choices and not believe all the promises that colleges make. Because they’re making them in their own interest, not in yours.
A college degree is supposed to open doors to the future, but overwhelming debt can make grads feel trapped instead
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