Archive for category: Education

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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!

Finding a path from here to an education system that meets social needs while respecting the freedom of its members remains to be done. Illich challenges us to make sure our ideas pass the test of freedom

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

Eleni Schirmer, Jason Thomas Wozniak, Dana Morrison, Rich Levy, Joanna Gonsalves

How deep in debt is your university? Find out today on Debt Reveal Day!

The post American Universities Are Buried Under a Mountain of Debt appeared first on The Nation.

When Pete Hatemi, a political science professor at Pennsylvania State University, got an email from a student he didn’t know asking him to become a faculty adviser for a conservative group on campus, he did some research on the organization, Young Americans for Freedom, and quickly decided that he wanted nothing to do with them. Among current and former leaders of YAF chapters across the country, he learned, were declared white supremacists, believers in the QAnon conspiracy theory, and supporters of the Ku Klux Klan and the Proud Boys. Some were involved with neo-Nazi activist Richard Spencer. And at least one had participated in the assault on the U.S. Capitol, staged by hundreds of supporters of former President Donald Trump less than a week before the student’s email.

As a matter of policy, Hatemi never gets involved in student groups no matter their affiliation, he said, but he thought it his responsibility to make sure that the student was aware of the group’s ties to far-right extremists. So he declined the request and offered some advice. “Your timing, frankly, could be seen as offensive to many,” he wrote, referring to the January 6 assault. “It might be time to reflect on what you stand for and what your organization stands for.”

Hatemi said he put quite some thought into his two-paragraph response. “The right thing to do was to say, ‘Hey, you need to take a look at what you’re doing and this group you belong to,’” he told me in an interview. “If I say nothing, what kind of educator am I?”

Within days, Hatemi’s email to the student was published on Campus Reform, a conservative website that bills itself as the “#1 Source for College News” and whose stated mission is to expose “liberal bias and abuse on the nation’s college campuses.” The article accused Hatemi of having “lashed out” at the student and “responded harshly” to his request. Quotes from Hatemi’s email also appeared in right-wing publications like The Federalist, The Blaze, and the Post Millennial, and they spread on social media, where they were manipulated and stripped of context. A deluge of hate mail followed, directed at Hatemi as well as at his university’s administration. Some of it threatened violence, prompting campus police to intervene, though Hatemi declined to comment on the details. The university did not respond to a request for comment.

Kara Zupkus, a spokesperson for YAF, wrote in an email to The Intercept that the group “has regularly condemned white nationalism, mob violence, and extremism.” She also referred to a statement the organization issued shortly after the incident involving Hatemi.

“It is Penn State YAF’s constitutional right to exist on campus – whether this professor likes it or not,” the group wrote then. “To attack all conservative students and YAF by accusing them of supporting riots and violence with no evidence is disgraceful and unbecoming of a professor at an institution of higher education.”

Campus Reform is published by the Leadership Institute, a nonprofit that has trained conservative activists for four decades through the generous funding of billionaire donors like the Koch family. The institute reported more than $16 million in revenue in 2018 alone. Over the last several years, Campus Reform has targeted hundreds of college professors like Hatemi, leading to online harassment campaigns, doxxing, threats of violence, and calls on universities to fire their faculty. Professors featured in Campus Reform stories have felt isolated and confused as they came under attack, often over public statements they made but sometimes over things they said in class or even academic research they published. Campus Reform stories have regularly been picked up by a host of established conservative outlets, from Breitbart to Fox News, amplifying outrage and unleashing abuse in a manner that observers of the site note mirrors how far-right extremists attack their targets online.

“The effects of Campus Reform stories can be similar to the online harassment often deployed by white supremacists,” said Isaac Kamola, an assistant professor at Trinity College who studies the politics of higher education and closely monitors the site.

A majority were singled out over their comments on race, and Black professors were disproportionately targeted.

Kamola has tracked more than 1,570 stories posted on Campus Reform since 2020 and surveyed the 338 individuals they targeted, many of whose official profiles and contact details were linked to in stories about them. The survey, the results of which will be published by the American Association of University Professors’ Academe magazine, found that at least 40 percent of respondents received “threats of harm” following a Campus Reform article, mostly via email and social media but also often by phone, text message, or postal mail. One professor reported receiving thousands of emails, many of them laced with violent, racist, and sexist comments, Kamola said. In the most extreme cases, he added, online trolls published the professors’ personal information online, forcing them to change their phone numbers, leave their homes, and retain security. Less than half the people surveyed by Kamola reported receiving support from their universities’ administrations, and more than 12 percent reported facing disciplinary action as a result of a Campus Reform story. Three people said they lost their jobs.

The professors were targeted over a variety of liberal positions, the survey reveals, but a majority were singled out over their comments on race, and Black professors were disproportionately targeted. Those who discussed topics like antifa, Black Lives Matter, and Palestine were especially subjected to threats, the survey found. And the intimidation seemed to work, with nearly a quarter of surveyed professors saying that they dialed back their social media presence as a result of being targeted, even though others said that the experience bolstered their commitment to speak out about social justice issues.

“I basically know that Campus Reform has written something about me because I’ll just suddenly start getting vicious hate mail in my inbox,” said Asha Rangappa, a senior lecturer at Yale University who was twice the subject of Campus Reform stories and has described the site as an example of “domestic information warfare.”

“Within 24 hours, it will have been cited or replicated in an entire ecosystem of right-wing media,” she added, noting that professors who lacked the social media status to push back were particularly vulnerable. “It’s just never clear why it’s newsworthy; it’s portrayed as something crazy and outrageous, and it is never contextualized. But it very predictably turns into a barrage of targeted harassment.”

Campus Reform’s managing editor and the site’s chief spokesperson did not respond to requests for comment. Morton Blackwell, a conservative activist and the founder and director of the Leadership Institute, wrote in an email to The Intercept that the institute “was founded to train and develop principled conservative leaders for our country: men and women who share our country’s founding principles of liberty, individual rights, and equal justice for all under the rule of law.”

Photo Illustration: Soohee Cho/The Intercept, Photo: Getty Images

Cancel Culture

Campus Reform is emblematic of the raging battle in American public discourse over so-called cancel culture, which the site’s writers have regularly lamented even as they set out to cancel the reputations and jobs of the people they attack. Campus Reform is also the product of a decades-old conservative and libertarian effort to shape the values of U.S. higher education through a series of organizations that give the appearance of a diverse and organic conservative campus movement but are in fact part of the same coordinated network.

First published in 2009 as a resource hub for conservative students at U.S. colleges, Campus Reform was created to give them what it called “weapons in their fight for the hearts and minds of the next generation of citizens, politicians, and members of the media,” according to research by Sam McCarthy, a student at Trinity College who works with Kamola and has been studying the site as part of her sociology thesis. About eight years ago, Campus Reform began to rebrand as a “news” site, McCarthy said, aiming to expose bias, waste, and abuse on college campuses and obscuring its political agenda behind a pledge of objectivity and “rigorous journalism standards.” Around that time, the site began to recruit and groom a cadre of student correspondents tasked with discovering instances of liberal misconduct; the site paid $50 per story, or $100 if they included video or photos, McCarthy found.

Soon Campus Reform established a tiered system of rewards for its contributing writers: After publishing four articles, a correspondent would rise from bronze to silver and make $75 a piece. After 15 articles, they would rise to gold and receive $100 per story. Other perks include a verified email account, a blue check on Twitter, business cards, and a press pass, as well as résumé writing help, recommendation letters, mentorship opportunities, and a pipeline to a career in conservative media. Campus Reform offers a way for student writers to build up a portfolio, a chance for their stories to go viral, and access to a steady stream of media gigs, with the most high-profile being appearances on “Fox and Friends” or “Tucker Carlson Tonight.” Even nonwriters can benefit, making $50 for tipping the site off to supposed liberal abuse.

McCarthy calculated that the site’s most prolific writer has published 253 articles since last May, which could have earned them more than $26,000. And while student correspondents she interviewed shared the site’s politics and mission, they told her that the financial incentives were a main draw.

“There’s a lot of money in it,” she told me in an interview. “But there’s some real harm that comes out of this apparatus.”

After Campus Reform published a story about Alyssa Johnson, an assistant professor at Louisiana State University, over a tweet she had posted in response to an incoming student’s racist slur, she faced such an onslaught of abuse and threats that she was forced to leave her home.

“Nobody directly said, ‘I’m going to come kill you,’ but it was so close to that.”

The story was picked up by scores of right-wing outlets, including Fox News, and went viral on social media and on a website for LSU sports fans, where insults and attacks against Johnson filled chat rooms for dozens of pages. “I read them all because I just wanted to make sure that nobody had found my address,” said Johnson, who is Asian American. She noted that a majority of the online comments as well as hundreds of emails she received were filled with sexist insults and “racial slurs about Asian people that I had never even known existed,” she said.

Johnson erased her social media profiles, unplugged her office phone, and filed a police report, but the intimidation got so bad that she ended up temporarily relocating with her husband and two small children to wait out the storm. “Nobody directly said, ‘I’m going to come kill you,’ but it was so close to that,” said Johnson, who declined to press charges even though police told her that some of the messages she received amounted to crimes. “I didn’t want to be worried about somebody showing up at my door, threatening my family.”

It took more than two months for the attention to die down. As Johnson learned more about Campus Reform, she connected with other people who had gone through similar experiences, and they built a network offering support to the site’s latest targets. Johnson has since taken a step back from Twitter. “I post much less; I don’t ever post opinions anymore or really any thoughts,” she told me, noting that she was consumed by guilt for putting her family in harm’s way. “I hate to give in because it’s exactly what they wanted: They wanted to silence me. But it was a feeling that I never want to feel again.”

“Most Universities Have No Clue”

Institutional responses to Campus Reform have varied significantly. A senior communication executive at a top-ranked private university, speaking on the condition of anonymity to avoid drawing Campus Reform’s attention, said that his university has a policy against responding to any requests by Campus Reform or the College Fix, another right-wing outlet with “an agenda to undermine respect and credibility for higher education.” When student journalists reach out to faculty members seeking comment on something they wrote or said, professors often want to answer in good faith, the executive added, providing thoughtful and lengthy responses that are invariably distorted to give the story an extra boost.

“We just hit delete,” he said. “Nothing good comes from engaging with them.”

Often both university administrators and instructors have little understanding of the amount of money and coordination by outside interests that goes into these attacks, said Kamola, who regularly reaches out to people targeted by Campus Reform with information about the site and its funders. Hatemi, the Pennsylvania State University professor, was surprised to learn from Kamola that Campus Reform was “actually a whole program” designed to put faculty through the barrage of harassment he had just experienced. “Most universities have no clue,” he said.

After he became the target of what felt like an organized intimidation effort, Hatemi dug into YAF as well as Campus Reform and the Leadership Institute and published a long essay detailing their ties to far-right extremists. In the essay, Hatemi listed more than half a dozen YAF affiliates with white supremacist views or connections and referenced YAF-sponsored campus activities like a “Catch an Illegal Immigrant” contest and a “Koran Desecration” competition. While not all YAF members might have shared such views or participated in such activities, the fact that he could find so many examples “within minutes of researching YAF,” Hatemi wrote, spoke to the group’s deep connections to far-right extremism.

Hatemi said he hoped that his essay might help others in similar situations, but he also wanted to ensure that his own employer understood the Campus Reform story as “an outside, concerted effort to manipulate the system.” While no university official formally contacted him about it, he says he initially feared that he might face discipline, hearing “chatter” about it from colleagues, which disappeared as soon as he published his research.

Several professors argued that as learning institutions have increasingly come to view students as paying customers, they have become more preoccupied with reputational damage and public relations than with the tenets of intellectual freedom and education that are essential to academic life. “University administrators often don’t take the side of their faculty member because they don’t necessarily understand how the story originated, what the funding sources are, what the political intentions are of the platform,” said McCarthy. “And so we see the faculty member facing adverse consequences that they really should not have, under their academic freedom.”

Photo Illustration: Soohee Cho/The Intercept, Photo: Getty Images

Platforming Fascists

In its own words, the Leadership Institute, Campus Reform’s publisher, aims to train “freedom fighters” to “effectively defeat the radical Left.” Funded by a host of well-known, ultrawealthy donors, including multiple foundations connected to the Koch family network, the institute claims to have trained more than 200,000 conservative activists since its founding in 1979 and offers a rich program with a heavy focus on media and communications.

Andrew Isenhour, a spokesperson for two major Koch institutions, wrote in an email to The Intercept that “no support or resources from the Charles Koch Foundation or Charles Koch Institute benefit Campus Reform.”

“We find any form of racism, white supremacy, or intolerance abhorrent and morally repugnant,” he said, adding that the institute has denounced intimidation and spoken in support of “campus free speech.”

Isenhour did not respond to follow-up questions about the Koch family’s support for the Leadership Institute, which employs Campus Reform staff. According to DeSmog, an environmentalist publication that closely monitors the Koch network, the Leadership Institute received at least $278,958 from Koch-related foundations between 2003 and 2017. The Leadership Institute is also part of the State Policy Network, a group of think tanks and political groups funded through the Koch network. Top institute funders also include Donors Capital Fund and Donors Trust, anonymous conservative donor funds that have been called “the Dark-Money ATM of the Conservative Movement.”

The Leadership Institute has long been a major player in mainstream conservative politics, and its early alumni include Republican elected officials like Sen. Mitch McConnell and former Vice President Mike Pence as well as James O’Keefe, the right-wing provocateur behind Project Veritas, famous for his doctored videos targeting the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now, or ACORN, and Planned Parenthood. There is a revolving door between the Leadership Institute, YAF, and other conservative youth groups like Young Americans for Liberty and Turning Point USA.

“The Leadership Institute has helped manufacture the right’s construction of anti-antifa hysteria, all while having a long history of platforming actual fascists.”

The group, however, also has a less-known history of ties to far-right movements and racist extremists. “There is actually a long history of close connections between the Leadership Institute and white nationalist organizations,” said Kamola, the Trinity professor. “The Leadership Institute has helped manufacture the right’s construction of anti-antifa hysteria, all while having a long history of platforming actual fascists.”

Matthew Heimbach, a neo-Nazi activist, former YAF chapter leader, and once-Leadership Institute trainee, told HuffPost in 2016 that the institute “trained this entire next generation of white nationalists.” The institute also employed Kevin DeAnna, another former YAF leader who started the campus-based white supremacist group Youth for Western Civilization. In his essay, Hatemi included photos of both Heimbach and DeAnna posing with neo-Nazi activist Richard Spencer as well as a photo of Spencer and Kyle Bristow, a former YAF chapter leader who called Latino students and faculty “savages” and went on to become an attorney for right-wing figures, representing both Spencer and KKK leader David Duke.

Hannah Gais, a senior researcher at the Southern Poverty Law Center, which monitors extremism, said that the Leadership Institute “definitely has had, historically, ties to the far right and extremism.”

But Gais, who exposed writings DeAnna had posted under different pseudonyms on several prominent white nationalist publications, also noted that the institute is so large that “to a certain extent, some of these kinds of pseudo-anonymous white nationalists coming up through their ranks is sort of inevitable,” she said.

The far-right movement that resurfaced during the Trump years, she added, deliberately relied on the resources of established conservative institutions to gain political power. “If you’re a far-right extremist and you can kind of hide your views and make them seemingly more professional,” she added, “it’s a lot easier to lurk in these spaces.”

“Campus Reform’s content tends to be shared in fringe social media spaces where we have seen consistent thematic overlaps with other content we know plays well with right-wing audiences.”

More recently, former Leadership Institute intern Martin Christopher Rojas was exposed as an active contributor to a series of white supremacist publications, where he published more than 500 pieces under his own name and a series of pseudonyms. The Guardian and the nonprofit Right Wing Watch also recently reported that Michael J. Thompson, a regular in conservative circles who worked with the Leadership Institute and Campus Reform, was also a frequent contributor to online white supremacist publications, where, under the name “Paul Kersey,” he started the racist blog “Stuff Black People Don’t Like” and wrote lies about the demographic replacement of white Americans and the genetic inferiority of people of color. Thompson’s stories have since been scrubbed from Campus Reform.

In his email to The Intercept, Blackwell, the Leadership Institute’s founder, distanced himself from former institute affiliates.

“My Institute has employed hundreds of principled conservatives over the last 40 years,” he wrote. “A few former staffers managed to hide their beliefs from me and my staff. These individuals wrote racist articles under fake names to hide their identities. They went to great lengths to keep their true beliefs hidden. Such beliefs are entirely incompatible with employment at the Leadership Institute.”

Since rebranding as a news enterprise, Campus Reform has effectively been able to straddle between the mainstream conservative politics of its funders and a more radical audience active in fringe spaces and eager for content to feed its online wars.

According to an analysis by Media Matters for America, which monitors media and the web for conservative misinformation, Campus Reform stories have spread on Reddit as well as on social media platforms favored by the far right. Such platforms include Parler, the QAnon forum GreatAwakening.win, and Patriots.win, formerly thedonald.win, a forum for Trump supporters that moved to its own site after being banned by Reddit. “Our research has found that Campus Reform’s content tends to be shared in fringe social media spaces where we have seen consistent thematic overlaps with other content we know plays well with right-wing audiences,” said Stefanie Le, Media Matters’ deputy research director. “Similar to when an article from a conservative outlet goes viral on fringe platforms, users in these spaces attempt to focus on or invent conspiratorial implications of the stories and then use it to support other far-right narratives and stoke conversation.”

That feedback loop is indicative of how far-right discourse has benefited from the support of pillars of the conservative establishment and of the way that the latter have been willing to overlook the harm they enabled — a dynamic that Campus Reform lays bare.

“It really feeds into the conservative outrage machine that will take targets, tied especially to issues of culture war, and basically completely go off on them,” said Gais, of the Southern Poverty Law Center. “But they’re doing so with big money from the Koch Foundation.”

The post A Billionaire-Funded Website With Ties to the Far Right Is Trying to “Cancel” University Professors appeared first on The Intercept.

Book image provided by Harvard University Press

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Despite its centrality in public life and scholarly debate, education, surprisingly, has not been a chief focus of political or economic histories of the modern United States. The role of schools, however, has been fundamental to American historical development in several key ways. Politically, education was a key driver of American state-building from the local level up. Nineteenth-century public school enrollment rates in the northern United States surpassed those of France and Great Britain, and schools made up the largest share of municipal expenditures during the early twentieth century. The United States relied on schools as the basis of its decentralized welfare state, as opposed to robust social insurance or job protections characteristic of leading European welfare states, and school systems became vehicles for the provision of many social services.

Economically, schools played a central role in the making of American capitalism, structuring access to employment and serving as the training grounds for the new staff of the American corporate economy. By providing exclusive credentials, educational institutions gave economic elites a tool for controlling entry into the most well-paid positions. The Education Trap shows how the Progressive Era—popularly named for efforts to rein in the excesses of capitalism—in fact deepened and legitimized long-standing forms of inequality. Indeed, it was during this period, rather than in the late nineteenth-century Gilded Age, that income inequality reached its height. This book also bridges common divisions within labor history to examine the working lives of domestic workers, pink-collar staff, and highly paid professionals alike, contextualizing work within families and communities and highlighting the relation between groups of workers that shaped the development of each.

Culturally, schools also helped consolidate an ideology of individual advancement. This ideology is often characterized as a belief in equality of opportunity in contrast to equality of outcome. While rooted in a long American tradition of favoring reward for individual talent over hereditary privilege, this ideology was not static, nor should we imagine it operating autonomously. Rather, it was grounded in, fortified, and validated by experiences of schooling in the early twentieth century. As schools were imagined as a social panacea, they became a new foundation for individualized policy solutions to structural inequalities. “Educationalizing” social problems reduced pressure for more direct measures of reducing poverty and inequality. A growing body of scholarship has highlighted the ways in which American policymakers have persistently turned to solutions that place the blame, and the burden of re form, on individuals rather than society. The triumph of schooling in this era can help us understand why.

The ideology of education as a path toward social advancement was premised on the belief that one’s economic success reflected one’s skill level, or educational “merit.” Recent critics of meritocracy have pointed to the role of elite professionals in exacerbating social inequality, but many still cling to a faith in meritocracy in theory and point to educational solutions to address the problem. This book challenges us to reinterpret “merit” as a culturally constructed set of knowledges, behaviors, and values that reflect historically specific personal preferences and prejudices, often used by elites to maintain their power. Moreover, this book shows how the reconstruction of economic opportunity on the basis of education created a new institutional and ideological infrastructure for upholding socioeconomic inequality. As schools remade path ways into work across the employment structure, educational achievement (or lack thereof) became a new way of explaining and justifying the wealth of some and the poverty of others.

While education has many different meanings, this book focuses specifically on the role of education in shaping paths to work. The “vocationalization” of education, or the use of schools for economic reward, has long been criticized by educational reformers, from the early twentieth century through to the twenty-first Many nonvocational roles of education—such as education for democratic citizenship, intellectual and artistic creativity, and emancipation—are under threat, and are absolutely worth fighting for. But it is important to acknowledge that schools’ vocational role was enormously meaningful to those able to use schools, including “nonvocational” academic and liberal arts programs, to access better employment. Indeed, we can only explain the dramatic expansion of schools in this period if we acknowledge the role of parents and students who, by voting with their feet, pushed the educational system to expand its offerings and provide instruction that they believed would benefit them in the workplace.

To understand changes in training for work, we also need a wide lens that contextualizes schools as just one institutional form within an ecology of many sites of learning. By examining the full landscape of job-training institutions (including schools, universities, workplaces, the family) and the contested processes through which they forged links to distinct economic sectors, this book challenges long-standing silos in the field of educational history: between public and private, secondary and higher, formal and informal, “vocational” and “liberal” education. Public high schools and private universities a century ago were substantially shaped by competition with a flourishing ecology of proprietary and parochial schools, and the emerging public-private educational “system” was a distinctive feature of the American welfare state. While vocational education has often been interpreted and studied predominantly with reference to men’s industrial training, this book broadens the focus to encompass women’s occupational trajectories, as well as service-sector, white-collar, and professional jobs. In doing so, this book challenges the dichotomy between vocational and liberal (or academic) education by showing how forms of liberal education served as key paths to specific future employment opportunities. Liberal arts education, imagined in opposition to vocational concerns, was held up as an ideal across the political spectrum toward a variety of ends. In practice, however, this idealization became an important tool used by leading educational institutions to secure their status and prestige, as well as a means of legitimating the economic benefits attained by those with a supposedly nonvocational degree.

This book begins in the late nineteenth century, at a time when American pathways into employment looked haphazard. As detailed in Chapter 1, for nearly all wage earners in Boston, paths to work were based on family and social networks, and learning took place in the workplace rather than in school. Despite its lack of formal channels, the occupational structure was defined by many overt gender, ethnic, and racial inequalities. The rest of the book moves through each economic sector to illustrate the two interrelated patterns of transformation that restructured the labor market in the next decades: the failure of education intended to train students for low-wage and industrial work, and the success (and hence proliferation) of schools that trained students for white-collar and professional jobs. These two dynamics together reveal how education offered advantages for some, while simultaneously undercutting the power of organized workers and strengthening the power of elites. Faith in education as a way of mitigating a growing class divide was solidified just as the educational system provided a new institutional basis for reproducing class advantage. As a means of addressing social inequality, education became a dangerous trap.

Chapter 2 examines the failure of reformers’ efforts to improve the precarious employment of recent immigrants and African Americans in the lowest-paying service and manual-labor jobs. Based on the common diagnosis that low-wage work was due to a lack of skills, many progressive reformers pushed for the expansion of vocational training schools, such as “schools of housekeeping,” in order to elevate the status of household work. These efforts were largely unsuccessful. More popular services for low-wage workers included nurseries, kindergartens, English-language instruction, and citizenship classes, yet these services proved equally ineffective in reducing patterns of exploitation at the bottom of the occupational hierarchy.

For jobs in manufacturing and the trades, the subject of Chapter 3, conflicts between unions and employers over control of the training process hindered new industrial schools in both the private and the public sectors. Employers pursued managerial strategies to undercut the power of craft unions, and in place of the small shop with several craftworkers, sprawling assembly-line factories with immigrant operatives would come to define industrial America. Instead of receiving an education in specific industrial schools or industrial tracks within schools, which suffered from declining reputations and low enrollments, these factory workers learned basic literacy and numeracy in public elementary schools. This reorganization of the workplace was made possible by an army of school-educated white-collar workers that firms deployed to staff their corporate bureaucracies. Rather than the “organization man,” it was women who were the chief protagonists in this transformation.

Chapter 4 traces the changing landscape of training for clerical and sales work. With broad public support and without organized opposition, proprietary “commercial” schools and public high schools multiplied. The success of many women and second-generation immigrants entering positions as clerks, secretaries, and retail workers challenged some labor market inequalities and solidified the link between education and social mobility. Their entry, however, also sparked a reaction among a predominantly male, white, native-born elite. Upper-class Bostonians used professional strategies, relying on advanced educational credentials, to control access to the most remunerative jobs. An expanding white-collar sector became a differentiated hierarchy, with a vast pool of feminized pink-collar clerical and sales workers at the bottom and a new managerial class at the top. Thus, this new landscape of schools, while offering some opportunities, did not empower workers as a whole; rather, schools provided an opportunity for employers to centralize power. Professional strategies of control are traced in the professions of law and education and the “new profession” of business. By forging pathways from elite schools into corporate law, educational administration, and financial and business management, professionals and universities became coarchitects of the top rungs of the managerial ladder that undergirded twentieth-century corporate capitalism. In so doing, they defined the meaning of “merit” on the basis of academic knowledge as well as cultural norms, personal characteristics, and family background. They also shaped steep internal ladders within each profession, differentiating the corporate lawyer from the courtroom advocate, the administrator from the teacher, and the executive from the low-level manager. Rungs on the professional ladder not only corresponded to a hierarchy of schools, but also to hierarchies of gender, ethnicity, and race.

This book ends when these trends were consolidated in the 1930s. During the Great Depression, when youth employment collapsed, school enrollment continued to grow. By this point, employers across sectors had come to prefer school-educated employees, and formal education structured the majority of pathways into jobs. The triumph of school based training had significantly reshaped the employment structure and the balance of worker power. While the expansion of formal education opened up many new pathways into work and limited the overall supply of labor by keeping youth out of the labor market, this transition also undercut earlier forms of worker control by facilitating the transition to a nonunionized workforce and a credentialed elite. The 1930s and 1940s marked the beginning of a new chapter in the American political economy, when workers launched more inclusive organizing strategies for building power through industrial unions and the role of the federal welfare state greatly expanded.

Additional studies of other places and eras will be necessary to fully piece together the historical relationship between education and in equality in the United States. But the case of Boston challenges deeply rooted assumptions among both scholars and the general public about how education works. In early twentieth-century Boston, education expanded as socioeconomic inequality increased. The contested history of this development suggests that our national faith in education may be obscuring how schooling can in fact deepen economic inequality and conceal the ways in which educational merit has become a new foundation on which this inequality is justified.

By shifting the contemporary conversation about social inequality from the 1970s to the early twentieth century, the historical narrative presented in this book should also prompt a change in our understanding of the “great compression” between 1940 and 1970, when inequality was substantially reduced. The expansion of public higher education in that period has been heralded as a key contributor to the decline in inequality during those years. This golden age is also the basis upon which economists have rested claims that the best policy solution to address inequality in the present is more education. According to these scholars, we can think about the relationship between education and technology as a race, in which, if education falls behind technology, inequality in creases. From the late nineteenth century to the late 1970s, educational attainment rose faster than “skill-biased” technological change (or technological change that favors highly skilled workers), causing a reduction in social inequality. After the 1970s, however, educational attainment slowed as technological change continued apace, disproportionately benefiting those with the most human capital, and thereby increasing social inequality.

The evidence presented in this book suggests that many other political and economic factors were necessary preconditions and supplements to education during the midcentury decline of inequality. These include the expansion of social and economic protections by New Deal and Great Society welfare programs, progressive taxation, minimum wage laws, and the broad economic power of industrial labor unions led by the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO), which increased the power of workers and ensured that the jobs they entered had living wages and good working conditions. Education has always operated within a broader political and economic context that shapes its impact on social inequality. In addition, rather than imagine “education” monolithically, this book shows the very different roles played by distinct institutional types, some of which were much more effective as tools for concentrating wealth than redistributing it.

Beginning in the 1970s, social welfare protections, labor rights, and workers’ collective power began to be stripped away. Wages stagnated and middle-class jobs were “hollowed out.” Educational enrollment, meanwhile, continued to grow. Between 1963 and 2006, enrollment in public and private four-year colleges and universities nearly doubled, and community college enrollment increased by over 700 percent. To human-capital economists, this educational expansion has not been enough to mitigate the benefits accruing to those with the highest human capital. But the equation of skill and economic reward cannot explain the surging income and wealth of the top 1 percent, nor why the economic payoff of advanced education is so much higher in the United States than in other countries. As observed in the early twentieth century, educational expansion can trigger reactions from distinct organized political interests, in particular those at the top of the economic ladder who seek to preserve their power. Credentialist theories of occupational control seem better equipped to explain why the primary beneficiaries of rising inequality today are concentrated in highly credentialed professions in key positions in the corporate economy. Without a corresponding increase of power for working people, the benefits of additional educational attainment can be captured at the top.

The historical perspective offered in this book suggests that focusing only on expanding educational opportunities traps us into a narrow policy framework that can exacerbate the very problem it seeks to address. In our new Gilded Age, we can look back to the first Gilded Age over a century ago for insight. The role of education in amplifying unequal opportunity was not a unique product of the neoliberal turn of the 1970s or the corporatization of higher education, but a deeply rooted outgrowth of the historical relation between education and the economy in the United States. In an era of skyrocketing inequality, we need a new historical understanding of the consequences—sometimes for the better but more often for the worse—of the American faith in education as the panacea for social inequality.

Cristina Viviana Groeger is an Assistant Professor of History at Lake Forest College. Her research has been funded by the National Academy of Education and the Spencer Foundation.

Excerpted from THE EDUCATION TRAP: SCHOOLS AND THE REMAKING OF INEQUALITY IN BOSTON by Cristina Viviana Groeger, published by Harvard University Press.

The aphorism ‘publish or perish’ began gaining popularity in Western academia in the first half of the 20th century. By the 1980s, it had become unquestioned truth throughout most of the world. It is now a refined and institutionalised process in which researchers are subject to increasing pressure to publish in academic journals owned by a handful of companies. In 2013, publishing groups Reed-Elsevier (now RELX Group in the Netherlands), Springer (Germany), Taylor & Francis (UK) and the US-based Sage and Wiley-Blackwell accounted for more than 50 per cent of the research papers and 70 per cent of the social science articles published that year.

Researchers and university professors are obliged to fulfil a series of requirements or ‘merits’ each year, the most significant of which is the publication of academic papers. These papers are evaluated according to the ‘referee system’ or peer review in which two or more specialists are appointed to judge whether an article is suitable for publication. Public institutions such as Spain’s National Agency for Quality Assessment and Accreditation (ANECA) or Argentina’s National Scientific and Technical Research Council (CONICET) are responsible for overseeing the accreditation of the merits upon which researchers’ careers and salaries depend.

“The problem is that the obligation to publish a certain number of articles in a year is incompatible with the actual research work itself, which goes through phases of greater and lesser productivity. The criteria is more quantitative than qualitative, which is perverse,” says Pilar Pinto, lecturer at the University of Cadiz and candidate for a PhD in art and humanities. In addition to this pressure to publish, academics are also expected to have a good number of teaching hours.

According to Pinto, the evaluation system plays a significant role in the choice of research topics: “The journals propose topics for their dossiers, which influences what we decide to research and write about.”

This system also forces researchers to avoid more complicated – as well as more interesting – questions that cannot be resolved in just a few months time in a single paper. This is particularly concerning in areas such as mathematics and philosophy.

“In mathematics, the sowing process is long and you don’t know when you’re going to harvest. The more complex the problem the less certain you can be that it will lead to something you can publish. So the system pushes young researchers to abandon more profound topics in order to focus on something that can easily be resolved, taking something that is already published, for example, and simply improving some calculations,” explains mathematics PhD Mattia Perrone. “Researchers are rewarded for understanding how the system works rather than for their ability,” says Pinto.

The business of academic publications

The points that researchers receive for publishing articles depend on the journal’s ranking according to its index or ‘impact factor,’ calculated according to the number of times it has been cited compared with its competitors. The higher a journal scores, the more effort researchers will make to publish in it, which feeds into pattern that reinforces certain types of journals and topics. The highest scoring and most sought after journals ask as much as €1,500 to evaluate an article for publication, an amount usually paid by the university department.

“The only people able to be part of the academic elite are the ones who can afford it. The system is designed for the interests of the United States and Europe. Paying such amounts would be unthinkable in Argentina,” says Alexandre Roig, lecturer at the Universidad San Martín (UNSAM) in Buenos Aires, academic secretary and former dean of IDAES. Moreover, the best-ranked journals are in English, which excludes many researchers who are not fluent in the language.

Originally designed as a guide for librarians in choosing which publications to acquire, the ‘impact factor’ has become an index of scientific quality and turned leading academic journals into profitable businesses.

They charge authors for evaluating a publication but do not pay the evaluators, who must settle for the compensation of adding one more line to their CVs. So while most researchers have been trained at public universities and work for public institutions, their work is subject to the standards of privately owned journals.

And universities provide a captive audience for these journals. University departments are forced to spend a significant portion of their budgets on subscriptions to certain publications in order to keep up to date with scientific literature. Reading a single article on the web can cost between €20 and €50, while an annual subscription to a journal costs between €2,000 and €20,000. In many cases, publishing companies require that subscriptions last a minimum of several years and that they include several journals. Faced with such abuses, Swedish and German universities decided to cancel their subscriptions to Elsevier’s publications in 2018 when they could not reach an agreement they considered fair.

In this model, public money invested in research is transferred to certain publishing companies. “Access to knowledge is being limited,” says Perrone, who says he had to pay €30 to access an article he himself had written. Another effect is that academics tend to divide their research results into as many articles as possible, a practice known as ‘salami slicing’. The result is an increasing number of published papers that are of decreasing interest. And journals charge for evaluating each one of them.

In 2018, cOAlition S, a consortium supported by the European Research Council (ERC) together with national funding agencies from eleven EU countries and Jordan, Zambia, the UK and the US, launched Plan S (for ‘shock’) in Europe. The initiative will force researchers to publish their work in open access journals and repositories. Originally planned for 2020, Plan S is now expected to come into effect in 2021.

However, it is unclear what impact this initiative will have. Some of the most influential journals are already taking their own steps in this direction, such as Nature, which launched an open access system to publish part of its content in a way that is compatible with Plan S. The catch is that publishing there will mean paying much higher fees, which can approach €9,500.

Creativity versus discipline

Another consequence, especially for developing countries, is the disconnect between research and local realities: “What is valued is publication in indexed journals rather than the possibility of applying knowledge locally. In Argentina, research has become increasingly professionalised while becoming less interested in applying scientific advances,” says Bruno Fornillo, PhD in political science, CONICET researcher and lecturer at the University of Buenos Aires. “The evaluation criteria to which scientists are subjected are unreasonable because their idea of excellence is measured in terms of publications in global journals with no link to realities on the ground.”

This, Roig believes, is one of the reasons for what he describes as a crisis of legitimacy in the social sciences: “Peer review is valuable, because it guarantees rigour of research. But if it becomes the only form of validation it excludes social validation, and science thus turns its back to society.” Roig proposes other forms of validating scientific knowledge: “Presenting results to the subjects of your research, participating in public debates, communicating the results not only through writing but also through drawings, audiovisual media and art.”

However, the current system is a long way from encouraging creative forms of research and communication: “It’s common to hear young researchers say that academia is not their place. But academia should be a place for critical thinking and creativity, not for reproduction,” Roig adds.

In the 1960s and 1970s, intellectuals were visible public figures, teaching at universities while being deeply involved in social struggles of the day. May 1968 and the French intellectuals are a perfect example. A few decades later, against the backdrop of an expanding neoliberal model, a system has been put into place at universities that generates huge profits for a group of companies.

But profit may not be the only motive: “My impression is that the model is designed to keep intellectuals from being a ‘nuisance’,” Fornillo ventures. “It’s a disciplinary system and, as such, it is contrary to knowledge. It’s about strengthening a certain hierarchy,” Perrone adds.

Meanwhile, the researchers immersed in this logic of productivity are losing the capacity for critical thinking and reflection on their own practices. As Roig puts it: “Today, Pierre Bourdieu’s book would not be called The Craft of Sociology, but The Craft of Someone Who Specialises in Writing Papers.”

Opportunistic university administrators seize the opportunity presented by Covid to gut academic freedom and turn faculty into employees

Archive for category: Education

What Is Middle-Class Activism?

Night One: Autonomous Action in Lincoln, Nebraska

Analysis of Night One

Nights Two and Three: Passivity Takes the Reins

Analysis of Nights Two and Three

Night Four: The Activists Protect the Police

Analysis of Night Four

Beyond Night Four: The Movement Defeated

Analysis of Night Five and After

Conclusion

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.”

Sean Illing

Kevin Carey

Sean Illing

Kevin Carey

Sean Illing

Kevin Carey

Sean Illing

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Sean Illing

Kevin Carey

Sean Illing

Kevin Carey

Sean Illing

Kevin Carey

Sean Illing

Kevin Carey

Sean Illing

Kevin Carey

Cancel Culture

“Most Universities Have No Clue”

Platforming Fascists

The business of academic publications

Creativity versus discipline

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