This is the talk I gave at the National Day of Action for Higher Education on April 17. My co-panelists and I, Tim Kaufman-Osborn and Amy Offner, each had 12 minutes. To keep it short I organized it as a set of propositions.
London on April 18, 2015
1. The first necessary step has been taken –university lawfare against the Trump Administration.
This recognizes that the Trump regime are not reformers of higher ed, but are its destroyers. This increasingly obvious fact has a hard implication, which is that the Trump administration is an enemy to be defeated, not a counterparty to be bargained with.
An organization that saw this immediately has been the AAUP, which rapidly went to court, and I can’t overstate how impressed I am by both the national organization and by so many individual chapters— AAUP Penn, Rutgers, it partner CUCFA at the University of California, multiple unions, and many other faculty and staff organizations. You all have done great work at getting inside the high-speed operating loop of the Trump people, and being appropriately adversarial. There’s a real chance that we will win on many fronts, if we keep fighting hammer and tongs.
2. Higher ed must work with Democrats but must not be led by them.
The reason is that the Democratic party has repeatedly failed to articulate the purposes and the political economy of higher education. The result is that Democrats see themselves as the natural party of education—they get the votes of most college graduates—while misselling what higher ed is and therefore not convincing the wider electorate of its value.
For example, the most painful chart I’ve recently seen is from the Democratic pollster David Shor via Ezra Klein.
Amazingly, the allegedly Democratic issues of education and student debt are actually in a toss-up with the Republicans. Voters don’t really know whether the Republicans who want to eliminate the Dept of Education that administers financial aid including Pell Grants, or that wants to give student loans back to private banks, are better or worse for education than Democrats. This is an obvious disaster for Democrats, and for higher ed.
Voters are confused in part because mainstream Democrats have no strongly anti-Republican positions on college. Most Democratic politicians aren’t really for free college—that’s Bernie Sanders still out there on his own. Democrats aren’t really for debt cancellation. Democrats aren’t really for full public funding of regional colleges so working-class people get really high quality degrees. Democrats are for college as job training—just like Republicans are. Democrats have one idea about college, which is that it’s tuition-based vocational training, with some means testing, but high net costs are okay. This is Gov. Newsom in California, Kamala Harris as a presidential candidate. They sell us out as job training and they still can’t get non-college voters.
Democrats are bad on advancing strong higher education for the basic reason that they don’t listen to educators. Educators need to lead ourselves.
3. Anti-intellectualism is always pervasive in America—and yet it is not popular in America.
The Democrats aren’t convincing people to vote big for great public colleges not because college is too intellectual, but because the Democratic version isn’t intellectual enough. Republicans are the enemies of popular thinking, everyday study, affordable intellectuality. But as I’ve just suggested, so are tag-along job-fixated mainstream Democrats. Governor Newsom had the professional college-hater Charlie Kirk on his podcast in March, and when Kirk mocked students who “go to Cal to go study North African lesbian poetry,” the Democratic education governor chuckled right along with him: “Well, I don’t know every single damn course,” the governor explained. “It should be like, no way.” Meanwhile, the proverbial jobs of the future require more education, not less, across all disciplines, especially in the humanities, arts, and social sciences, including in North African lesbian poetry. The Democrats are screwing up even their vocational issue without offering an alternative.
4. Higher ed’s own story – freed from the Democratic party-- must center on popular intellectuality. On popular thinking, thinking as popular, thinking for all. College has a core role in this sense: college helps you think so you can have the life you want.
College doesn’t help you adapt to “this modern world” by learning to use AI so it can think for you. College doesn’t mainly help you meet important people and make new friends. College doesn’t mainly give you practical workplace skills. College helps you think so you can have the life you want. You may think that’s a weak bumper sticker—it sure needs work-- but it’s a hell of a lot better than the college bumper stickers that political parties or university presidents are selling right now (“study a higher-wage major”)!
We must stress as part of this re-narration the non-pecuniary benefits and the public benefits of learning as much as everyone already stresses the private benefits. And yet the re-narration of college has to start with helping everyone of all backgrounds, working class, immigrant, racialized, boringly middle class, queer, everybody, build the personal life you want, not the life mapped out for you by your family, your neighborhood, your background, but the one gradually imagined and then given to you by you. Here’s why we don’t ban books but why we read them. College helps you think so you can have the life you want.
The next two items are a package. I’m going to raise a tricky issue and sound elitist, though I will argue that my claims are anti-elitist.
5. Higher education is being crushed both by propaganda-based Republican hate and by its twin, a widespread knowledge crisis among US voters.
That last chart, David Shor’s, shows this aspect as well as the weakness of the Democratic storyline: many if not a majority of American voters are profoundly mistaken, wrong, misguided, or ignorant about political and social realities and causal connections, including education.
The data show that Republicans, on most of their powerhouse (lower right quadrant) issues, perform worse that they say they will on the basis of their wrong ideas —Republican presidents oversee lower growth than Democratic presidents and higher debt growth in relation to inflation; inflation was twice as high under Biden as under Trump 1, but that is not the general pattern. Or lower-left quandrant issues (less urgent, Republican advantage)—AI is a Republican issue because they will completely deregulate it and then it will work better? How is trade going? Unemployment: there’s the same scatter in the overall trend. Voters rate Republians as good as Democrats on civil Liberties even as Republicans favor summary deportations, arbitrary cancellations of student visas, etc. -- it’s as though most respondents aren’t sure about the meaning of the term. Drug addiction—voters prefer the party that kills any and all public health programs? Democrats are tied on voting rights with a Republican party obsessed with voter suppression for 25 years.
Another chart on the knowledge issue: We have evidence that the misinformed voter voted Trump, and the “get the right answer” crowd voted Harris. (I discussed this chart in “Politics of Thinking”).
So first, Democrats have a lot of weak positions that don’t resonate with voters. (They were bad at taking inflation seriously, and Harris did drop the anti-corporate policies that are actually popular with voters.) But second, many, many voters also can’t correctly describe reality and then pick the policy and the candidate that correlates with the outcome they want. Hence the term knowledge crisis, a phenomenon that is being exploited politically.
6. Higher education has to present itself as the solution to American wrongness.
This is going to involve a few things. I’ve mentioned one—redefining college as the key to the thinking that helps people have the lives they want.
Another is the creation of an ethical framework around the duty to know. Nobody has the right to not bother to figure out whether a president really can engage in summary deportations and maybe not follow court orders to fix bad deportation mistakes. Shrugging about this, and staying confused or unsure, is an unethical position, as much for bystanders as for government agents of the policy. Tens of millions of people are indeed not bothering to think about this kind of Trumpian tyranny, or about the destruction of US university finances and of academic freedom. Not thinking is a major reason why illegal, unjust, and destructive things keep happening. Voters have no right not to think about them. We’re going to need a broader cultural change that both inspires and demands serious popular thinking about public issues.
Educators must figure out encouraging ways to take a stand on this, and must do this at a time when we have been largely brainwashed into thinking that it is elitist to expect US voters to be intelligent and to take responsibility for their mistakes. This is not elitist—it is a matter of survival. People know this in their personal lives, and every successful activist has known that it’s not elitist to know things. Authors of slave narratives knew things, Malcolm X knew things, your favorite auto mechanic knows things, indigenous leaders know things, your really good plumber knows things, all your sports heroes know things, all the activists we admire were successful because their action, their pursuit of power, was suffused in knowing things. And then these knowers didn’t back down from fights, but instead sought fights. The AAUP knows things. We know things. The only way to escape the Deplorables Taboo, in which college types and professionals offer a double standard of no intellectual accountability for “regular Americans,” is to embrace the conflict, create the conflict that needs to be created, hate the ignorance but love the knower, win the conflict on the basis of knowledge.
I’m suggesting that the university, collectively, must frame an existential duty to know. Zuckerberg has the duty to know how his products damage thinking, politics, and mental health. Bezos has the duty to know that the Donald Trump who would outlaw trans people and refugees would also kill trade with tariffs. A small majority of voters doesn’t get to be wrong again and again and then get all mad and hostile when people point that out –they do do this anger-based deflection, but they have no right, and in contrast they do have a duty to know—about the real consequences of how they think. Universities, professors, students, everyone, have to lay out a large national narrative about this duty to know.
7. make the full ask for all of the material conditions that will allow popular intellectuality to spread. We are twenty-five years into the student debt crisis and the public university funding crisis, and we do know what these are:
A. free public college. The goal is Debt-free for all and free tuition is the most efficient means.
B. Student debt cancellation.
C. Programs enabling full inclusion and radical diversity: full and defiant support for anti-discrimination measures leading to racial equality within colleges and universities.
D. Tenure-track jobs for all instructors who want them.
E. Tenure for staff—by which I mean the replacement of “at will” with “just cause” employment for the staff of our colleges and universities
F. The full support of research costs for all fields – arts, social sciences, and humanities as much as STEM—at all types of colleges very much including community colleges. (Trump’s cuts to indirect cost recovery rates and deletion of many STEM grants could zero out institutional funding for the humanities and arts. This must not be allowed to happen.)
G. Full academic freedom, which includes the financial means to allow bottom up, faculty-controlled collaborative design, not dictated by austerity and consultants, of new era college curricula that fit current conditions.
H. The democratization of university governance to allow the previous elements to be created over time—which will involve abolishing governing boards, perhaps by converting them into powerless figureheads something like the Danish monarchy
Yes I do have the budget slides to show how to pay for all this. But aluckily for you I’m out of time.
The fight for higher ed--the fight for the knowledge and for thinking—is on the front line of this battle for knowledge, justice, and democracy as indivisible issues. And we need to think of all contingencies. So
8. Plan for the building the underground university.
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