Archive for category: Education

For all those who feel inclined, please consider donating to the UAW’s strike hardship fund.

At 8:00 am on Monday, November 14th, some 48,000 workers, represented by the UAW, went on strike across the University of California system. This constitutes the largest strike of academic workers in United States history, and the largest strike of 2022. The striking workers are graduate student instructors, undergraduate tutors, postdocs, teaching assistants, and student researchers. In solidarity, we have come together to demand a fair contract from the University of California (UC) – seeking improved child care, the elimination of non-resident fees for international students, and, most pressingly, the right to work where we live.

The history of this strike can be traced back to 2019, when students at UC Santa Cruz initiated a wildcat strike which spread throughout much of the UC system. The central demand of this movement was a complete reconceptualization of graduate student compensation. Instead of a wage system based on a set salary, with small, percentage-based salary increases negotiated with the UC every four years, the workers at Santa Cruz proposed a new system: tying wages to the cost of housing in the communities in which UC campuses are located. In essence, their demand for a cost-of-living adjustment (COLA) stipulated that no graduate student should have to live in rent burden, a metric defined by the Department of Housing and Urban Development as the need to pay more than 30% of one’s income on rent. Currently, a majority of UC graduate students pay more than 50% of their income on housing, classifying them as severely rent burdened.

In our current negotiations with the UC, the 2019 workers’ demand has been reformulated to stipulate that graduate student employees should have their salaries raised to $54,000 per annum, with subsequent yearly wage increases tied to the cost of housing. Tying graduate student compensation to the cost of housing is crucial for graduate student workers because it deprives the UC of its greatest economic weapon – the ability to use inflation, and especially housing inflation, to reduce any economic “gain” made at the bargaining table to an inevitable loss a couple of years later. This is especially poignant given that the UC is one of the largest for-profit landlords in California. Forcing the UC to meet this demand would strip The University of California of its ability to counteract any wage increases with a rent hike on graduate student housing.

The UC’s exploitation of graduate student workers through the rents it collects on its properties became especially apparent when, during the beginning of the Covid-19 pandemic, UC Berkeley decided to raise rents at the University Village complex by 4%. Such an increase was intolerable, especially since many University Village residents lost their income due to the pandemic—particularly the partners and spouses of graduate student employees who had lost their jobs. Many residents at the Village responded to the increase with a rent-strike, which successfully resulted in a rent-freeze. However, as Jason Bircae, a graduate student in UC Berkeley’s English Department, described in a speech delivered at a Spring 2022 union rally, the University retaliated against several of those who decided to go on strike. Per Bircae:

…when UC retaliated against residents who had unpaid back rent by placing holds on our registration, we didn’t know who to turn to. The worst part was that the registration hold on my account prevented me from being employed by the university. The UC as a landlord was saying ‘you can’t register for classes until you pay off your debt’ and the UC as an employer was saying ‘we can’t pay you until you register for classes’. It felt like I was in a Kafka novel. It left me feeling bitter and isolated. Later, I did get in touch with other residents who shared with me how they’d been denied access to health and child care services; access to scholarship and grant money; even access to their own diplomas. Some residents had to leave the village with their unpaid rent trailing behind them as debt.

The wildcat movement that started at UC Santa Cruz dissipated after the beginning of the Covid-19 Pandemic. But today, a world-wide increase in labor militancy has electrified our current negotiations with the UC for a fair contract, resulting in an October 2022 strike authorization vote in which 98% of all participants voted to go on strike. Of all the strikes and unionization drives which have happened since the onset of the pandemic, special attention should be given to the Columbia graduate student strike of 2021-2022, which lasted for ten weeks, and fundamentally transformed the landscape upon which graduate students engage in economic warfare with their employers – demonstrating the effectiveness of long-term strikes within higher education.

UC’s current proposals do not come close to meeting graduate students’ material needs. Teaching assistants and associate instructors have only been offered a raise of 7%, with subsequent annual increases of 3%. With national inflation at 7.7%, this “raise” amounts to an effective pay-cut. As of the writing of this article, the bargaining team for two of the units which represent graduate student employees have passed a proposal which does away with the demand for a cost-of-living adjustment. Instead of tying our compensation to the cost of housing, the proposal stipulates that wages should increase by a flat rate of 7% every year. Despite this recent development, the demand for a cost-of-living adjustment continues to be the primary motivation for many, if not most, workers across the UC to continue the strike. In an increasingly uncertain economic landscape, workers do not merely require that their compensation catch up to inflation, but that they are ensured that their wages will always be enough to provide for life’s basic necessities.

Over the course of bargaining, the UC has accumulated thirty-four unfair labor practices, which range from the UC illegally increasing some workers’ compensation outside of the terms of the contract during bargaining (a tactic used to erode workers’ sense of solidarity), to the UC attempting to interfere with union activity. UC San Francisco offers a particularly colorful example of worker intimidation, where a recently tenured principal investigator was caught in the act of “angrily ripping down all the UAW posters that were posted on the 13th floor of the UCSF Parnassus Medical Sciences Building.”

UC administrators have also targeted faculty with their union busting tactics. Some faculty who support the strike have expressed that statements made by the UC, while not rising to the level of unfair labor practices, serve to “confuse” and “mislead” faculty members about their rights during the strike. Most crucially, what is at stake is the right of “non-managerial” faculty members to refuse to cross the picket line and stand in solidarity with their striking graduate students. On November 14th, Executive Vice Chancellor and Provost Benjamin Hermalin and Chief People and Culture Officer Eugene Whitlock, both of UC Berkeley, sent out a statement to all faculty, staff, and students which reads: “Faculty members are aware that they must ensure that instruction is delivered to their students.” In response, the Berkeley Faculty Association – an organization that has been publicly supportive of the strike – sent an email to its membership dismissing the administration’s statement and emphasizing that it “is factually untrue and has no legal-basis.” When requested to comment as to whether the November 14th statement violates faculty’s right to not cross the picket line, EVCP Benjamin Hermalin responded with the following:

The University respects the right of faculty to engage in protected and concerted activity, including respecting the UAW picket line. The statement you quote is a general statement concerning the faculty’s obligation, under the Academic Personnel Manual, to deliver the curriculum and, to the extent possible under the circumstances, minimize the impact on enrolled students. While I am not an attorney, it is my understanding that the law in this area is highly nuanced and somewhat ambiguous; hence, people may wish to take any blanket black-and-white statement on the matter with a grain of salt. (emphasis added)

Now that the semester is coming to a close, the administration at UC Berkeley is attempting to weaken the power of striking graduate student workers by demanding grades from graduate student instructors (GSIs) who work as graders, TAs, and instructors. James Vernon, a professor of history at UC Berkeley and chair of the Berkeley Faculty Association has reported that faculty “were also asked to collect grades from GSIs (graduate student instructors) before the strike began.” The withholding of grades is one of the primary points of leverage which graduate students have in negotiating with the university. A recent email from the UC Berkeley Academic Senate states that “The register has agreed to extend the deadline for the submission of grades through Cal Central from December 21 to December 31. We are aware that an additional ten days is not nearly enough to mitigate the very substantial workload that faculty teaching large classes may confront.” There are two important points to extract from this excerpt. First, this email seems to indicate that faculty should scab striking workers by picking up, to the best of their ability, any work that their TAs and GSIs are refusing to do. Faculty, of course, have no obligation to perform labor which would otherwise be done by a graduate student. Additionally, the fact that the grading deadline has been moved to the 31st demonstrates that striking graduate student workers are most powerful when they both withhold instruction and disrupt the operation of the University’s administrative apparatus by withholding grades.

Despite the administration’s efforts, the UC graduate student worker strike has been met with incredible solidarity from other unionized workers across the UC system. Statements of support and solidarity have come in from fellow unions, including the ILWU, which represents the longshoreman who work at the Port of Oakland, and AFSCME Local 3299, which represents service and patient care technical workers across UC campuses. Many UPS drivers who are organized with the Teamsters refused to cross the picket line and did not deliver packages to UC Berkeley. The same can be said for garbage truck drivers and construction workers at UCB. The latter work stoppage would have continued, had the UC not threatened to serve UAW with an injunction if it did not stop picketing construction sites on campus. Undergraduate students at UC Berkeley associated with the campuses’ chapter of the Young Democratic Socialists of America (YDSA) helped to organize a 1,500-person march to UC President Michael Drake’s mansion. Gabriel McAdams, one of the march’s organizers and a UAW member, gave the following reason for why undergraduates overwhelmingly support the strike:

Students support the strike because they realize that their GSIs’ working conditions are their learning conditions. When GSIs have to scrape by just to pay the rent and feed their families, they do not have the time and energy to give their students the attention and care they deserve. Undergrads know the status quo is simply not fair to their instructors or to them as students. That’s also why I am out on the picket line, because a fair contract helps both academic workers and students across all of California.

The strike across the UC system is just one of many strikes taking place within higher education at the current moment. From adjuncts at the New School in New York, to university employees across the United Kingdom represented by the University and College Union, workers across higher education are not merely attempting to better their economic standing, but to assert that they are indispensable in a system that continues to ignore the worth of non-tenured educators of all varieties.

Misha Lerner is a graduate student in the Department of Slavic Languages and Literatures at UC Berkeley. Special thanks should be given to Zach Hicks (Slavic UCB) and Sophie Lockey (Slavic UCB) for helping to edit this article.

A Texas law requiring public schools “to assert the country’s collective trust in God” by…

With the vociferous debate over President Joe Biden’s announcement that the federal government will cancel a portion of outstanding student debt, it’s important to understand how Americans came to owe the current cumulative total of more than $1.6 trillion for higher education.

In 1970, Ronald Reagan was running for reelection as governor of California. He had first won in 1966 with confrontational rhetoric toward the University of California public college system and executed confrontational policies when in office. In May 1970, Reagan had shut down all 28 UC campuses in the midst of student protests against the Vietnam War and the U.S. bombing of Cambodia. On October 29, less than a week before the election, his education adviser Roger A. Freeman spoke at a press conference to defend him.

Freeman’s remarks were reported the next day in the San Francisco Chronicle under the headline “Professor Sees Peril in Education.” According to the Chronicle article, Freeman said, “We are in danger of producing an educated proletariat. … That’s dynamite! We have to be selective on who we allow [to go to college].”

“If not,” Freeman continued, “we will have a large number of highly trained and unemployed people. Freeman also said — taking a highly idiosyncratic perspective on the cause of fascism — “that’s what happened in Germany. I saw it happen.”

As Biden cancels (some) student debt, remember why the debt exists. A key Reagan advisor warned in 1970 that free college was producing the dangerously explosive “dynamite” of an “educated proletariat,” and “we have to be selective on who we allow to go through higher education”: pic.twitter.com/SWqZFRRTuN

— ? Jon ? Schwarz ? (@schwarz) August 24, 2022

Freeman was born in 1904 in Vienna, Austria, and emigrated to the United States after the rise of Hitler. An economist who became a longtime fixture in conservative politics, he served on the White House staff during both the Dwight Eisenhower and Richard Nixon administrations. In 1970 he was seconded from the Nixon administration to work on Reagan’s campaign. He was also a senior fellow at Stanford’s conservative Hoover Institution. In one of his books, he asked “can Western Civilization survive” what he believed to be excessive government spending on education, Social Security, etc.

A core theme of Reagan’s first gubernatorial campaign in 1966 was resentment toward California’s public colleges, in particular UC Berkeley, with Reagan repeatedly vowing “to clean up the mess” there. Berkeley, then nearly free to attend for California residents, had become a national center of organizing against the Vietnam War. Deep anxiety about this reached the highest levels of the U.S. government. John McCone, the head of the CIA, requested a meeting with J. Edgar Hoover, head of the FBI, to discuss “communist influence” at Berkeley, a situation that “definitely required some corrective action.”

During the 1966 campaign, Reagan regularly communicated with the FBI about its concerns about Clark Kerr, the president of the entire University of California system. Despite requests from Hoover, Kerr had not cracked down on Berkeley protesters. Within weeks of Reagan taking office, Kerr was fired. A subsequent FBI memo stated that Reagan was “dedicated to the destruction of disruptive elements on California campuses.”

Reagan pushed to cut state funding for California’s public colleges but did not reveal his ideological motivation. Rather, he said, the state simply needed to save money. To cover the funding shortfall, Reagan suggested that California public college could charge residents tuition for the first time. This, he complained, “resulted in the almost hysterical charge that this would deny educational opportunities to those of the most moderate means. This is obviously untrue. … We made it plain that tuition must be accompanied by adequate loans to be paid back after graduation.”

The success of Reagan’s attacks on California public colleges inspired conservative politicians across the U.S. Nixon decried “campus revolt.” Spiro Agnew, his vice president, proclaimed that thanks to open admissions policies, “unqualified students are being swept into college on the wave of the new socialism.”

Prominent conservative intellectuals also took up the charge. Privately one worried that free education “may be producing a positively dangerous class situation” by raising the expectations of working-class students. Another referred to college students as “a parasite feeding on the rest of society” who exhibited a “failure to understand and to appreciate the crucial role played [by] the reward-punishment structure of the market.” The answer was “to close off the parasitic option.”

In practice, this meant to the National Review, a “system of full tuition charges supplemented by loans which students must pay out of their future income.”

In retrospect, this period was the clear turning point in America’s policies toward higher education. For decades, there had been enthusiastic bipartisan agreement that states should fund high-quality public colleges so that their youth could receive higher education for free or nearly so. That has now vanished. In 1968, California residents paid a $300 yearly fee to attend Berkeley, the equivalent of about $2,000 now. Now tuition at Berkeley is $15,000, with total yearly student costs reaching almost $40,000.

Student debt, which had played a minor role in American life through the 1960s, increased during the Reagan administration and then shot up after the 2007-2009 Great Recession as states made huge cuts to funding for their college systems.

That brings us to today. Biden’s actions, while positive, are merely a Band-Aid on a crisis 50 years in the making. In 1822, founding father James Madison wrote to a friend that “the liberal appropriations made by the Legislature of Kentucky for a general system of Education cannot be too much applauded. … Enlightened patriotism … is now providing for the State a Plan of Education embracing every class of Citizens.”

“Knowledge will forever govern ignorance,” Madison explained, “and a people who mean to be their own governors must arm themselves with the power which knowledge gives.” Freeman and Reagan and their compatriots agreed with Madison’s perspective but wanted to prevent Americans from gaining this power. If we want to take another path, the U.S. will have to recover a vision of a well-educated populace not as a terrible threat, but as a positive force that makes the nation better for everyone — and so should largely be paid for by all of us.

The post The Origin of Student Debt: Reagan Adviser Warned Free College Would Create a Dangerous “Educated Proletariat” appeared first on The Intercept.

How do universities relate to the cities in which they are located? How does the expanding corporatization of higher education fit into the conversation about how universities occupy — and reshape — local spaces and local economies?

Davarian L. Baldwin, the Paul E. Raether Distinguished Professor of American Studies at Trinity College, is the author of In the Shadow of the Ivory Tower: How Universities are Plundering Our Cities (Bold Type Books). This very well-written and provocative book discusses what Baldwin refers to as the rise of UniverCities, a phrase which signals the complicated relationship between higher education and urban life and reflects how universities are shaping today’s cities in grossly inequitable ways, with class, racial and deep financial implications. Baldwin’s timely book adds to the growing body of scholarship examining the corporate refashioning of colleges and universities. In this interview, Reshmi Dutt-Ballerstadt and Bertin M. Louis Jr., co-editors of Truthout’s Challenging the Corporate University series, speak to Baldwin about his work, diving into the concept of UniverCities and exploring what an equitable relationship might look like between a university and the town it occupies.

Reshmi Dutt-Ballerstadt and Bertin M. Louis Jr.: Are UniverCities essentially modeled after the logic of for-profit corporations?

Davarian L. Baldwin: My notion of UniverCities includes a discussion of what we call the “corporatization” of higher education but also exceeds the normal framing of that discussion. On one side, yes, the ramped-up retreat from the public funding of both public and private higher education forced schools to look for new revenue streams. Many became, in their own words, more “entrepreneurial,” marked by soaring tuition costs, corporate-funded research, the early push for cost-effective online learning, and the growth of a contingent faculty labor force. But on the other side, this narrative suggests that a sort of pristine higher education was corrupted by economic concerns instead of the new face of late capitalism. We must understand the degree to which colleges, universities and affiliated hospitals drive today’s dominant knowledge economy by bringing their research to the private market and, by extension, as the largest employers in cities and regions across the country.

Greater focus on the knowledge economy frame helps us understand my notion of UniverCities, which marks higher education’s growing control over urban development and political governance in, specifically, urban America. In this context, the campus as an urban form becomes the central vehicle for wealth capture, not just for schools but for financial institutions and the state. The campus exempts real estate expansion and private corporate partnerships from taxation. The campus converts the profitable labor of students into work study or apprenticeship status which, until recently, made this work exempt from collective bargaining. The notion of campus safety further protects the above wealth extraction by deputizing private police forces with public authority and uneven public accountability.

In short, my UniverCities concept is best framed by the knowledge economy instead of corporatization. Because here, the campus has not been corrupted, but in fact, the campus form is the clearest vehicle for value capture as city blocks are converted into what one developer calls “knowledge communities.”

In your introduction you state, “There is no question that higher education institutions can deliver positive community outcomes for their cities. But the central question remains: What are the costs when colleges and universities exercise significant power over a city’s financial resources, policing priorities, labor relations and land values?”

It is obvious from your analysis that the “growth” that universities claim comes at the cost of adversely and disproportionately impacting communities of color (particularly Black and Latinx communities). How should our neoliberal universities address this imbalance, both for low-income minoritized citizens living in these cities and for students who face financial hardships? Furthermore, what are the racial implications of UniverCities?

So first, we must dismantle the presumption that there is a stable divide between the so-called town and gown. As I try to lay out in my book, the very prosperity that we see on campuses ensconced in ivy, glass and steel is directly extracted from the public wealth, knowledge and labor power of the many times impoverished host communities. At a basic level, these imbalances are rooted in wealth extraction, so they can be remedied through reparations. Reparations include scholarships for the descendants of the enslaved and Indigenous whose labor and land made these institutions possible. Reparations means addressing the collusion between universities and both private real estate developers and state agents in the 20th century segregation, demolition, and displacement of communities through a redistribution of university land and its resources. Reparations can also mean pro-rating endowment and property tax exemption based on university commitments to community-driven engagement and investment. These are just a few examples, but the bottom line here is whether its wealth, land, curricula or historical markers, we are talking about a new vision of “shared governance” where aggrieved communities (which goes beyond simply blood-verifiable descendants) must have a binding say in the university prosperity they help generate. The racial implications for this are direct and profound because while non-white people have been central to campus wealth, they remain largely marginalized from campus possibility whether that be educational access, neighborhood governance or resource sharing.

In your book, you write: “Despite the clear racial disparities of a two-tiered system, schools all across the country looked to [University of Chicago] as a model for policing urban campuses.”

The campus as an urban form becomes the central vehicle for wealth capture, not just for schools but for financial institutions and the state.

Post-George Floyd’s murder in 2020 and calls for creating anti-racist universities and large student protests about the outcomes of campus policing, what has changed? How have private universities responded to these protests while also garnering support from politicians and political forces for increasing police presence (sometimes an armed police force, as endorsed by Michael Bloomberg)? Are there ways in which minoritized students, faculty and staff have been retaliated against due to protesting racist police and policing policies on university campuses?

One of the most powerful results of the Black Spring protests of 2020 was that the broader movement for police abolition turned its attention to higher education, which brought greater light to existing campaigns like Cops Off Campus. Many universities continue to increase their police forces in the name of servicing surrounding Black and Brown communities or deputize health workers and instructors in the name of abolition. But it’s organizations like the Cops Off Campus Coalition, and others, that call out these tactics and demand a real framework of divestment from militarized policing and investment in trauma care, living-wage jobs, and housing and food security as real public safety, to start.

Private schools like Amherst College and Tufts, or public schools like San Francisco State have been pushed to form task forces or even mandates towards some form of abolition. But we will see. After massive movement work, Johns Hopkins was forced to put a hold on their massive private police department. But during the current backlash to Summer 2020, they are seizing on resentments to restart the policing process and they are not alone. Black and Brown residents pay the biggest price. Community members of color are racially profiled and stopped by campus police at rates that far exceed their population. At the same time, all across the country, students and staff of color have told me stories of being overpoliced because they look like “locals.” They are also attacked and profiled for protesting general campus policing practices or the very notion that the presence of local (non-white) residents on campus should justify heightened policing. Meanwhile, women of all backgrounds pay the price from over-policing the perimeter and under-policing the campus because addressing largely white-on-white crimes like sexual violence and assault would tarnish the brand of the institution. The only solution is divest/invest.

A significant focus of your book is on urban universities and the ways in which urban universities exploit their cities while claiming urban revitalization and growth. What about universities and college campuses located in rural spaces? Are they plundering the rural communities in a similar manner?

As an urbanist, my primary focus remains cities and their neighborhoods. But there is no question that the issues I explore apply to both college towns and rural communities. This plundering includes the expansion of campus police jurisdiction over entire counties or states. We see the encroachment on rural lands, which includes Indigenous reservation areas. There is also the appropriation of local farming techniques and seed cultivation into intellectual property by agricultural schools for the bioscience market. But the rural story is one that is ripe for further study and political coalition building.

Have universities fundamentally shifted their mission from serving the common good to serving the neoliberal and corporate interests creating “unjust” universities?

These imbalances are rooted in wealth extraction, so they can be remedied through reparations.

I think universities have ramped up a focus on their profiteering interests, whether that be to counter the state divestment in education, to gain great power and profits with private partners, or both. But, as historian Craig Wilder has pointed out, this contestation between the profit university and the people’s university goes back to the U.S. colonial period and its slave economy. At the same time, the pushback against this unjust university is also hardly new. In periods like the revolutionary 1960s, there were visions of a broader campus community that included police abolition, affordable community housing on campus, free education, and other elements that go beyond some of today’s seemingly radical platforms. But one thing that is vital about previous blueprints is that most never advocated tearing everything down but instead advocated for a reconstruction and redistribution of knowledge and resources driven by a common vision of higher education, an abolition of current conditions.

Many universities and colleges opened during the COVID pandemic, forcing faculty, staff and students to return to campus to serve corporate interests (housing, food services, etc.). How have these UniverCities capitalized on the COVID pandemic?”

Yes, I lived this! But my privileged capacity to self-protect in this pandemic has far exceeded the capacity of the so-called “essential campus workers,” a status which perfectly aligned with the conditions of low-wage and contingent campus workers who are most vulnerable and easy to exploit. COVID-19 simply amplified an already existing exploitative relationship that has now been brought into the stark relief of life and death. Campuses placed service workers on furlough, many times with limited benefits. They are pushing fiscal austerity measures while simultaneously stuffing CARES Act money into record high endowments. Schools capitalized on social distancing to shift curricula towards more labor-suppressive (and hence cost-reductive) online learning. In expensive cities, where graduate students depend on university-owned housing, administrators refused to freeze or reduce rates. Elder and immunocompromised faculty have been refused online teaching options and forced into retirement while replaced with more precarious labor.

But the travails of COVID-19 extend beyond campus work. Residents in West Philadelphia made clear to me the health risks that come with introducing thousands of students, with various health care practices, into an already vulnerable Black community so schools can capitalize on tuition, residential life and retail revenues.

How have Trinity College, where you work, and other institutions reacted to your work? What reactions were you expecting?

Campuses … are pushing fiscal austerity measures while simultaneously stuffing CARES Act money into record high endowments.

I think surprising to me, Trinity has actually been quite supportive, providing the seed money for my now very busy Smart Cities Research lab. The broader university reaction to the work reveals the stratified nature of campus communities that defies the caricature of “radical snowflakes.” Administrators have largely tried to ignore the work or counter with their “good” projects because they can’t contest the research. Many tenured faculty resent that I am broadening the battle beyond faculty concerns with academic freedom, shared governance or simply faculty housing. Junior and contingent faculty and graduate student workers are energized and mobilized as the book came during a vibrant strike wave across campuses. Except for places with unions, campus service workers remain silent in fear of reprisal or find ways to give me the head nod of approval. And most powerfully, community groups have pushed me to convert this research into advocacy because while they live the stories that I tell they say the book confirms their experiences and makes them feel seen and part of a story that is bigger than anecdotes and single campaigns.

So now, through my lab, I am all over the country organizing with groups drafting state policy for property taxation, fighting for affordable housing and just campus labor conditions, working with medical professionals to ensure that university hospitals honor their indigent care mandates, advocating equitable occupancy and use of campus buildings, writing campus histories to push for reparations, drafting new “urban citizenship” curricula, designing social footprint mapping techniques to assess university wealth and reach. This blending of academic and activist labors has been just as transformative for me as for anyone else and now I see this as the core of my vocation, in the highest sense.

If universities were to take your argument about inequality and exploitations seriously, what are steps that UniverCities can take to address the issues of inequity raised in your book?

Hmmm, I think I have covered much of this in previous questions. But I will give an example that I discuss in the work as an additional example. I was blessed to spend time at the University of Winnipeg in Canada. And there, administrators created a vision of sustainability that included not just the environment but also social, economic and cultural matters for a campus situated in an Indigenous and multi-racial, immigrant community. So, this meant building housing that was not only LEED-certified but also available to both students and community residents with price points ranging from premium rate to rent-geared-to-income without a reduction in quality. Sustainability meant placing the new recreational center under a community charter that guarantees community use of the facilities during peak hours. Sustainability also meant getting rid of one of the food service multinationals, like Aramark or Sodexo, and creating the independent Diversity Foods where 65 percent of workers come from “marginalized” communities with the push for profit-sharing and 70 percent of supplies come from small family operations within a 100-kilometer radius. Now to be clear, even this model has its limitations as many residents from surrounding neighborhoods still find it hard to gain full access to these resources. In fact, University of Winnipeg professor Jim Silver realized that most Indigenous residents would never come to the main campus. He raised independent money to convert a dangerous boarding house into a learning annex with affordable housing right at the heart of the Indigenous North End community. The point here is that there are no guarantees in any of these projects, but the capacity to organize around a different set of values and the resolve to have those values reflected through the infrastructure of another university… it is possible.

This interview has been lightly edited for clarity.

The best option for many overloaded borrowers may be to just say no, argues an organizer in the debt strike movement

The Nazification of American Education

jay

Thu, 07/28/2022 – 11:55

Fox News host claims that desegregation via bussing “absolutely wrecked” the American education system

In late June, a conservative education coalition called the Civics Alliance released a new set of social studies standards for K-12 schools, with the intention of promoting it as a model for states nationwide. These standards, entitled “American Birthright,” are framed as yet another corrective to supposedly “woke” public schools, where, according to Republicans, theoretical frameworks like critical race theory are only one part of a larger attack on the foundations of American democracy.

“Too many Americans have emerged from our schools ignorant of America’s history, indifferent to liberty, filled with animus against their ancestors and their fellow Americans, and estranged from their country,” reads the introduction to “American Birthright.” (The “birthright” here refers to “freedom.”) And the fields of history and civics, it suggests, exemplify the worst of that trend. “The warping of American social studies instruction has created a corps of activists dedicated to the overthrow of America and its freedoms, larger numbers of Americans indifferent to the steady whittling away of American liberty, and many more who are so ignorant of the past they cannot use our heritage of freedom to judge contemporary debates.”

While it claims to represent an ideologically neutral, apolitical history, the document holds that most instruction that references “diversity, equity and inclusion” or “social justice” amounts to “vocational training in progressive activism” and “actively promote[s] disaffection from our country.” It heralds Ronald Reagan as a “hero of liberty” alongside Abraham Lincoln and Martin Luther King Jr. Its proposed lessons in contemporary U.S. history include Reagan’s revitalization of the conservative movement, Bill Clinton’s impeachment, “Executive amnesties for illegal aliens” and the “George Floyd Riots.”

American Birthright is just one of numerous recent right-wing efforts to overhaul public K-12 curricula to align with the dictates of current conservative ideology.

Last week, the Miami Herald reported that Florida’s Department of Education has begun holding three-day training sessions for public school teachers around the state to prepare them to implement the state’s new Civics Literacy Excellence Initiative, Gov. Ron DeSantis’ flagship effort to create a more “patriotic” civics curriculum. The new Florida standards were created in consultation with Hillsdale College, a small Christian college that has become a guiding force on the right, and the Charles Koch-founded Bill of Rights Institute.

As the Herald reported, a number of teachers who attended the first training, in Broward County, emerged with deep concerns. Some said the new civics standards appeared to promote “a very strong Christian fundamentalist way” of analyzing U.S. history. Others recounted that trainers had claimed that America’s founding fathers opposed strict separation of church and state, had compared the end of school-sponsored prayer to segregation and had downplayed the history of American slavery in misleading ways. (Slides from the training presentation noted that enslaved people in the U.S. only accounted for 4% of the trans-Atlantic slave trade, which both minimizes the number of people ultimately enslaved in America and suggests that other countries’ slavery practices were worse.)

Also last week, the Texas Tribune reported that a group of advisers to the state’s education board — which is adapting its own social studies standards after Texas’ legislature banned teaching about racism or slavery in ways that make students “feel discomfort” — had proposed that second-grade teachers call slavery “involuntary relocation.” (After a board member objected, the board voted to “revisit” that language.)

Currently, a number of conservative activists and media figures are campaigning against the Civics Secures Democracy Act, a bipartisan bill recently reintroduced in the U.S. Senate that would provide funding for civics education research and programming. In multiple articles calling on conservatives to oppose the bill, the Civics Alliance charged that the bill would “transform civics education, injecting identity politics into K-12 classrooms around the country” and divide “Americans into mutually hostile factions.” The National Review called the bill a trap that would open “the door to the nationalization of CRT.” And last week, DeSantis charged that the bill was an attempt to “buy off states with $6 billion if they sacrifice American History for Critical Race Theory and Biden’s other political whims of the day.”

But even in this climate, “American Birthright” seeks to distinguish itself through the scope of its ambitions. The document is not a curriculum but rather a model set of social studies standards, of the sort that state-level education departments adopt in order to guide and regulate individual school districts as they craft their own curricula.

That’s by design. Civics Alliance describes its mission as “preserving and improving America’s civics education and preventing the subordination of civics education to political recruitment tools,” namely by writing model bills and social studies standards that lawmakers and activists can use to influence the curricula schools and school districts create.

As the document explains, “We chose this form because state standards are the single most influential documents in America’s education administrations.” Not only do such standards have significant impact on public school curricula, they also affect those of AP courses, charter schools, private schools, homeschooling and textbooks used across the country. “American Birthright’s” authors charge that “far too many” state education departments “are set on imposing state social studies standards that combine…the worst of misguided pedagogical theory with the worst of anti-American animus.” So Civics Alliance is effectively bypassing them, taking their pitch directly to state governors, lawmakers and school boards, as well as grassroots activists who can pressure politicians to deploy the new standards.

* * *

The Civics Alliance was created in 2021 as an offshoot of another entity, the National Association of Scholars, a conservative nonprofit aimed at reforming higher education which features right-wing leaders like Ginni Thomas (the suddenly-famous spouse of Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas) on its board. NAS launched Civics Alliance after Joe Biden closed down the 1776 Commission — Donald Trump’s answer to the “1619 Project” — on his first day in office. In fact, the Civics Alliance seems to have consciously taken up the 1776 Commission’s professed mission. In “American Birthright,” the authors insist they aren’t seeking to create a uniform national curriculum, but cite the 1776 Curriculum — published in 2021 by Hillsdale College, from which two leading members of Trump’s commission were drawn — as aligned with their vision, along with the curricula of Great Hearts Academies, a “classical education” network, and the Black conservative group 1776 Unites.

NAS and its leaders have involved themselves in numerous contemporary education controversies. In 2018, Civics Alliance executive director David Randall took aim at Massachusetts education authorities after they revised the state’s social science standards. In a report with the Pioneer Institute, “No Longer a City on a Hill,” Randall charged that the new standards were “an exercise in progressive educational propaganda and vocational training for how to be a political activist” (a charge echoed nearly verbatim in “American Birthright”). As evidence, Randall wrote that the standards had subordinated the “Founding era” to the civil rights movement, used “politically correct vocabulary” such as “Native American” rather than “Indian,” noted that the Industrial Revolution had resulted in wealth inequality, and failed to recommend texts from right-wing icons like Phyllis Schlafly (on women’s rights) or Justice Antonin Scalia (on gun control).

This April, NAS released a brief warning conservatives that “social emotional learning” — at its most basic, a term for teaching students to regulate their emotions and play well with classmates — had been reoriented “toward teaching a radical political agenda and promoting student activism,” particularly around race. The Civics Alliance announced a corresponding initiative to build a network of state affiliates “dedicated to removing” SEL “action civics” from their states. DeSantis’ administration subsequently cited the use of SEL concepts as justification for rejecting nearly half of the math textbooks submitted to it for consideration by Florida schools.

This February, when NAS released a study ranking 15 different K-12 civics curricula, both the 1776 Curriculum and 1776 Unites received high scores, as did Florida’s new civics standards; NAS gave the “1619 Project,” predictably, an “F.” In a podcast interview last week marking the release of the standards, Randall said that he saw “American Birthright” as the sort of work Trump’s 1776 Commission might have created, had it continued. Indeed, a number of the same figures were involved in both.

The list of groups and individuals involved in the creation of “American Birthright” reads like a who’s-who of U.S. right-wing policy advocacy, including think tanks like the Claremont Institute, the Family Research Council and the creationist Discovery Institute, and influential state groups such as Arizona’s Goldwater Institute and Massachusetts’ Pioneer Institute. The document gives prominent credit to Florida’s Department of Education, and its 2021 revised civics standards, and lists a department official among its expert consultants.

Other coauthors, consultants and board members have played prominent roles in education stories Salon has tracked in recent months. There is Mari Barke, a California education board member and staffer at the right-wing California Policy Center, whose husband runs one of Hillsdale College’s charter schools. There is Richard Lowery, a University of Texas-Austin professor who helped propose a right-wing institute on the UT campus that Texas Republicans see as an antidote to CRT. There is anti-CRT activist Christopher Rufo, architect of the right’s education agenda for the last two years, as well as people like Parental Rights Foundation president William Estrada, Moms for Liberty cofounder Tiffany Justice, right-wing direct mail pioneer Richard Viguerie and multiple staffers associated with Hillsdale College and Schlafly’s Eagle Forum.

More importantly, there are more than 20 state lawmakers and elected officials credited with helping create the standards, including, most prominently, North Carolina Lt. Gov. Mark Robinson. Also listed is Arizona state Rep. Shawnna Bolick, wife of Arizona Supreme Court Justice Clint Bolick, who, as Salon reported last week, has been a leading figure in school privatization efforts.

* * *

“American Birthright” has yet to receive much attention from the mainstream press, but among conservative think tanks and media, it’s been heralded as the way forward, often by figures involved in its creation. City Journal, the publication of the Manhattan Institute, cheered the standards as a “Return to Lincoln.” Wisconsin’s MacIver Institute asserted that American Birthright “doesn’t train students to protest” but rather “to be students of history.” The Federalist Society declared, “Here’s what your child’s school should be teaching about American history and government.” David Randall himself wrote that the standards were necessary because, “If education reformers don’t act now, Woke social studies standards will teach a slanderous caricature of our history that prepares students to work to replace our republic with an illiberal regime.”

Some of the claims made to bolster American Birthright have been misleading, as when the Bluegrass Institute for Public Policy Solutions — another member of the coalition behind the document — suggested that Kentucky’s current standards mean students don’t learn about figures like Ben Franklin or Abraham Lincoln.

That’s far from accurate, said Sarah Shear, a professor of social studies and multicultural education at the University of Washington-Bothell and coauthor of two national studies assessing state K-12 standards on U.S. history, civics and government. Most state standards are streamlined by necessity, says Shear, and the absence of individual figures from general standards doesn’t mean they aren’t taught.

“I read every state’s standards, cover to cover,” said Shear. “And I’m just perplexed at the notion that the state standards are in any way radically left.”

What some have done, Shear continued, is open standards to more accurate and complex representations of history. “How does that threaten us as a nation, to know more and think more deeply about history, whether it’s Washington, Lincoln, the Constitution or the American Revolution?” she asked. “When we peel back the layers and reveal a much more detailed story of how the United States became a country, it’s not a story that includes everyone having freedom and democracy from the word go. That’s just not what happened here.”

“I often hear from people that telling the truth threatens the pretty story of the country we live in,” she continued. “But not telling the truth has harmed everyone, because it has not provided the capacity by which we could address the problems we still have.”

Christopher Martell, a social studies education professor at the University of Massachusetts-Boston who wrote a Twitter thread about “American Birthright” last week, says another problem with the model standards is how they provide fixed answers to questions that social studies classrooms are meant to debate, such as the role of the free market or how to balance questions of religious freedom.

Martell said he was particularly concerned about “a clear undertone” in American Birthright suggesting “that the U.S. is a Christian nation founded on Christian values and beliefs,” exemplified by passages calling for curricula to emphasize “the role of faith in sustaining and extending liberty” and describing America’s founding principles as “rooted in Christian thought.”

Likewise, Martell pointed to the standards’ ubiquitous emphasis on Western civilization, evident in the document’s statement that “America’s ideas of freedom” come from “the long history of Western civilization” but also in the way both U.S. and European history, which are covered in depth, are contrasted with “world history.”

While “American Birthright” presents Western civilization as a rich intellectual legacy that includes the creation of science and democracy, the non-European world is largely covered as the study of “migrations, clashes, massacres [and] conquests” undertaken by “small-scale tribes, nomadic societies, and villages that preceded civilization, whose warlike nature must be understood in order to comprehend the character and the magnitude of the civilizing process.”

“To me, that is like trying to embed white supremacy in the standards without saying, ‘This is the white supremacy curriculum,’” said Martell. “It sends a message that Western society is civilization, and the rest of the world is not.”

* * *

Much of “American Birthright” reflects recent education fights. For example, the document calls on the federal government to “withdraw from regulating or funding any aspect of K-12 education,” to pass legislation prohibiting “discriminatory pedagogies and action civics” (read: CRT and SEL), to require that high school studies classes teach “Western civilization” and that all academic standards be approved by state governors and legislatures, and to reform teaching licensure so as to “end the gatekeeping power of the education schools and departments.”

That last point in particular has featured in several recent attacks on public education. In an April speech at Hillsdale College, Christopher Rufo called for state lawmakers to rescind requirements that teachers must hold education degrees and forecast a future when teachers with masters degrees will be shunned by hiring committees, who would correctly see such credentials as signs of radical left-wing politics. Just last week, journalist Phil Williams at Tennessee’s NewsChannel 5 reported on secret recordings of Hillsdale president Larry Arnn disparaging public school teachers as having been “trained in the dumbest parts of the dumbest colleges in the country,” during a private event with Tennessee Gov. Bill Lee, who is rolling out Hillsdale programs across the state.

Similar to last week’s controversy around Florida’s civics training, which many participants felt minimized U.S. slavery, “American Birthright” instructs curriculum makers to teach that many more enslaved Africans were transported to Latin America or the Caribbean than the U.S. and suggests comparing U.S. slavery to “different forced-labor regimes, including Muslim slavery, Eastern Europe’s Second Serfdom, African slavery [and] American Indian slavery.” The standards also suggest that 19th-century European imperialism should be taught as a boon to colonized people, accounting for “Improved life expectancy and growing populations among colonized peoples” as well as the “Abolitions of slavery.”

Neither Martell nor Shear see realistic prospects that “American Birthright” will find a broad reception, either at the national level or among individual teachers. Both worried, however, that the standards could find a path to influence through conservative state lawmakers, as Civics Alliance itself clearly hopes.

“I imagine a bunch of conservative politicians handing this to state education agencies and saying, ‘We need to use this document to write our framework,’” said Martell. “Then teachers will have to address the framework when they are observed by their principals or when they talk about lesson planning with their departments.”

Some states, such as Illinois, make standards decisions at the local level, said Shear, meaning conservative activists might also lobby to get something like “American Birthright” introduced locally.

“It always comes down to who gets to control the narrative of whose experiences and whose voices matter,” said Shear. “When I see standards like Florida’s, or this ‘Birthright’ curriculum, it’s very much seeking a return to the narrative that privileges a particular identity and does not tell the entirety of the truth of what the United States has been in the past, is right now, or should be in the future. And that’s very worrisome to me.”

“There’s a long game with what they’re doing here. There was a long game to overturn Roe v. Wade, and I think they’re doing that with education as well,” said Martell. “Twenty or 30 years ago, I couldn’t have imagined a neoconservative, Christian-influenced civics workshop for teachers being pushed by the state.” Now, he said, in Florida and beyond, that’s here.

Please Help ZNet Perhaps the writer of these lines is not too far off from having a first-hand experience of the idea of Academentia that has entered the public domain in recent times. Academentia combines two things: a) academia, i.e. those working in post-secondary education, e.g. universities; and b) dementia: Read more…

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.

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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.

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