London on April 18, 2015   

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.

 

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. 

Paris on March 22, 2004   

The Coalition for Action in Higher Ed has organized a Day of Action on Thursday, April 17^th.  I’m speaking with Tim Kaufman-Osborn and Amy C. Ofner on a panel called, “Who Rules the Academy (and How To Fight Back)?” at 10 am Pacific. 

 

I’m going to argue that this is the best time to make the full ask for the university we actually want, not some triangulated dilution in the style of 1995 through about 2015, when Bernie Sanders made free college a national issue. It’s the best time because the insufferable right, wildly wrong about education, isn’t negotiating now but just hitting us in the face.  

 

Tim recently posted a piece in this space, and his book The Autocratic Academy argues for the democratization of higher ed. Join us if you can. I will post my talk on the blog later on and also the other two if they're willing.

 

Here I want to point out, as we start the 13^th week of the reign of Trump II, how fluid the political situation has already become. Fighting will be the opposite of futile. It will be essential and, over time, successful.

 

First, well, yes, the U.S. has now fulfilled its potential as a police state. M. Gessen is right about this.  Black Lives Matter--not to mention the 1950-1960s civil rights movement--long ago identified the practices that have now been systematized and turned into summary deportations of alleged gang members to a US-subsidized supermax “terrorist” prison in El Salvador, unannounced summary visa cancellations for noncitizen student critics of Israel and for non citizen students with no known contact with protests. Universities have not come together to object to this abuse of the student visa system. Nor are they openly opposing an escalation of tech-based spying and policing—or the low-tech version, like asking the University of California for the electronic details of all signatories of two letters (which the University submitted).  This harassment of critics of Israel, international students, and the university sector will continue.

 

But second, Trump’s aura of power has entered premature decline.  The best polling evidence I’ve seen are charts from John Burn-Murdoch which I’ve excerpted. 

All Republicans continue to support his draconian and frequently illegal immigration policy, but he’s losing non-MAGA Republicans on everything else. Burn-Murdoch noted,

The speed and scale of the American public’s souring on Trump’s economic agenda are stunning. [Just] before the tariff chaos, 63 per cent of Americans had a negative view of the government’s economic policy, comfortably the highest figure since records began almost 50 years ago.

 

As a result, third, Trumplash is well underway. The mass mobilizations are building. Hands Off and other national protests have been getting a lot of coverage abroad.  This will increase as Trumpian destruction moves deeper and deeper into the society and around the world. Trump has created simply enormous opposition to himself, of a range of types that will be hard to deal with all at once. The emerging consensus, even in the New York Times mainstream, is that “capitulation is doomed.”

 

Fourth, Big Capital has caught up with the rest of us in recognizing that Trump is an uncontrolled menace. $50-million-a-year executives, financiers, and the business press that didn’t mind his genocidal plan to turn Gaza into a Palestinian-free beach resort are enraged at his idiotic and destructive tariffs, two words now being applied routinely by the commentariat.  “Crazy” and “stupid” are routine descriptions.  I watched James Surowiecki lose his mind on X when he realized how badly Trump’s people had calculated their country-by-country tariffs  (here and here; see also the strangely accurate Saturday Night Live version.  

 

The FT  finance columnist, Robert Armstrong, who has icewater in his veins, shredded the tariff illogic in one paragraph and then wrote, 

 

Anyone with firmly held false beliefs will have regular, unpleasant run-ins with reality. They change course, only to drive right back into the same ditch. Trump won’t get what he wants from his tariff policy, so he will keep changing it, leaving markets scrambling to catch up. The tactics will zigzag as the fundamental strategic error remains.

 

Trump’s tariff calculation is just one example of the un-priceable chaos that markets find themselves in. 

 

True to Armstrong’s predication on April 4^th, Trump did a carve-out on his multiply-hiked China tariffs for smartphones and other products where his 145% tariffs was goring the oxen owned by the tech moguls who’d lined up behind him at his inauguration. 

 

A bit more on corporate disillusion: Armstrong is also right that this heightens rather than purges the contradictions. An angry Nouriel Roubini exclaimed, “Expensive IPhones 📱 and other high end consumer electronics purchased mostly by the well-off/affluent are exempted; but the 80% of good Chinese cheap consumer goods purchased by his left-behind blue collar base at Dollar Stores, Walmart, Costco, and other low price retailers are slapped with a 145% tariff. . . . This 145% tariff is the most regressive tax in US history that shafts the working class that he pretends to want to help while leading to almost no reshoring ever of jobs on goods we stopped producing in the US in the 1960s nor of the tech goods we want to reshore.”  

 

Confirming that latter point, Apple CEO Tim Cook was filmed somewhere explaining why Apple manufacturing will stay in China: 

There’s an impression that companies come to China because of low labor costs.  I’m not sure what part of China they go to but the truth is China stopped being the low labor cost country many years ago. The reason [companies come to China] is because of the skill—the quantity of skill in one location. And the type of skill it is. The products we do require really advanced tooling, the precision that you have to have in tooling, and working with the materials that we do, are state-of-the-art. And the tooling skill is very deep here. Now in the US you could have a meeting of tooling engineers and I’m not sure we could fill the room. In China, you could fill multiple football fields.  It’s that vocational expertise—it’s very deep here.

 

The mainstream business world is now belatedly focused on containing (without defeating) Trump. He faces a business class that went from supine endorsement to red alert in about a week.

 

Fifth, after much initial waffling between respectful engagement and obsequious appeasement, governments have become clear about Trump’s one-trick mafia method. It was nicely summarized by Pascal Lamy, former head of the World Trade Organization and ex-EU trade commissioner. 

Referring to Trump’s tactics, Lamy said it was best to respond robustly in a way the US president understood: “I think Mr. Trump learned to do business in the New York mafia-influenced real estate market and that his tactics are based on extortion – you hit and keep hitting for as long as you do not get a good price for stopping. Showing your muscle, it seems to me, is the way to transact with him and his people.”

Some people are figuring out the “good price for stopping.”  It can be the withholding of personal attacks coming from inside Trump House. The pro-tariff Trumper mogul (and Harvard ex-president Claudine Gay terminator) Bill Ackman tweeted on April 7^th to his 1.7 million followers:  

 

I just figured out why @howardlutnick is indifferent to the stock market and the economy crashing. He and Cantor are long bonds. He profits when our economy implodes. 

 

It’s a bad idea to pick a Secretary of Commerce whose firm is levered long fixed income. It’s an irreconcilable conflict of interest.

 

Nine hours later he tweeted an apology: “It was unfair of me to lash out at @howardlutnick. I don’t think he is pursuing his self interest. I am sure he is doing the best he can for the country while representing the President as Commerce Secretary” blah, blah, blah.  But message sent in the first tweet.  Message apparently received about a potential cost of internal division that Trump didn’t want to pay, not negated by the ritual apology.   

 

Meanwhile, other governments are preparing not only negotiations but further retaliation. In Europe, they’re finally gathering resources for a fight to protect a longer process of decoupling.    Germany is abandoning its cherished “debt brake” and the UK its restrictive “fiscal rules.” Trump is the best thing since Covid for European public spending and capacity building. 

 

Sixth, and in contrast, the Democratic opposition now consists of Bernie Sanders (a non-member) and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez on their Fighting Oligarchy tour plus Sen. Chris Murphy (D-CT) recording daily video critiques of Trump on X.  

 

More power to them, but their party has disappeared.  Kamala Harris has announced, “I’m not going anywhere,” which is literally true, and Gavin Newsom is focused on his podcast guests, particularly the election deniers helping him get in touch with his inner broligarch.  Party elders like James Carville are giving terrible advice, in this case, to do nothing, at which the party excels. Rising stars like Gretchen Whitmer are dooming themselves by accepting Trump’s framing on tariffs or whatever. 

(Dan Pfeiffer pointed out that “the better argument here is that he is a chaotic clown stumbling about the world stage, hurting American families by raising prices for no reason” [28’52”].) 

The American one-party Republican state is a big problem for organizing, and organizers obviously need to be much more aggressive in this bad environment.

Seventh, in spite of the #Hands Off and other movements amongst academic and government workers among many others, university boards and senior managers are not speaking out for universities, students, academic freedom, or education. There are a handful of exceptions that prove the rule—Michael Roth, Christopher Eisgruber, Danielle R. Holley, and Patricia McGuire, the presidents of Wesleyan, Princeton, Mt. Holyoke and Trinity Washington respectively. Nor are universities releasing data estimating Trump’s catastrophic research cuts--which demobilizes faculty, staff, and students--or banding together to denounce education’s enemies, including the irreparable harm of deportations, threatened as well as real. 

 

However, eighth, unions and faculty associations are speaking out, first by trying to activate their administrations and second by proposing their own schemes. 

 

Faculty at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst wrote a proposal for the 60 universities under investigation by the Trump administration to “unite in a coordinated, proactive defense,” with 11 policy items for their proposed Task Force. 

 

The Rutgers University Senate passed a “Resolution to Establish a Mutual Defense Compact for the Universities of the Big Ten Academic Alliance in Defense of Academic Freedom, Institutional Integrity, and the Research Enterprise.”  

 

University of Minnesota faculty asked its administration to take a much stronger stand in protected students under summary deportation orders.  

 

News of dozens of cancelled visas of University of California students has lead to a joint faculty-union “call upon UC to immediately address Student Visa Revocations.”  

 

The American Association of University Professors (AAUP) has been fully engaged on multiple fronts. For example, they wrote a 13-page letter to college and university general counsels offices on April 2^nd advising them that they are not legally obligated to “provide the personally identifiable information of students and faculty” to the Department of Education’s Office of Civil Rights.  

 

Ninth and last, there are inspiring student examples of still fighting for your original principles. There's the principle of full academic freedom to advocate for justice in Palestine without being deported, and there are the Columbia University students who chained themselves to a Columbia gate to protest the failure of Columbia to release information about the targeting and ICE arrest of Mahmoud Khalil.  

Amy Goodman interviewed some of the students for Democracy Now. 

 

SHEA: My name is Shea. I’m a junior at Columbia College. ...

AMY GOODMAN: You’re wearing a keffiyeh and a yarmulke.

SHEA: Yes. That’s standard for me.

AMY GOODMAN: Are you willing to be expelled?

SHEA: If the university decides that that is what should happen to me for doing this, then that is on them. I would love to not be expelled, but I think that my peers would also have loved to not be expelled. I think Mahmoud would love to not be in detention right now. This is — I obviously worked very hard to get here. So did Mahmoud. So did everyone else who has been facing consequences. And, like, while I obviously would prefer to, you know, not get expelled, this is bigger than me. This is about something much more important. And it ultimately is in the hands of the university. If they want to expel me for standing up for my friend, for other students, then that is their choice.

 

This kind of unflinching opposition needs support and national coordination into student-staff-faculty alliances--and alliances between university and government workers. It display the primal ingredient of meaningful victories down the road.

Covid-19 has brutally laid bare the devastating impact of several decades of privatization and capitalist globalization.  The rapidity of the virus' traversing of the globe, its powerfully unequal impact on different countries, and on different segments of the population within countries, are all linked together by the simultaneous expansion of the movement of goods and people and the evisceration of the public welfare and public health in many countries.  In the United States, to take the case closest at hand, the absolute under-funding of public health and the refusal to prepare for pandemics adequately is now reaping havoc on the population and on the doctors and nurses who are trying to heal them.  Three decades of diverting resources to commercializing publicly-funded research has only made this situation worse.  As the LAT has reported, Jerry Brown, with his usual lack of foresight, managed to dismantle a program that Arnold Schwarzenegger had created to respond to pandemics; in this he is an odd precursor to Donald Trump even if he did oppose him on many other things.  As I watch my medical colleagues struggle with insufficient safety equipment, a lack of ICU beds, an inability to test on a mass scale, and the exhaustion of overwork, I often wish that I lived in a modern country.

In the United States, of course, the pandemic is striking at a society riven by increased inequality.  Wage stagnation and the growth in corporate profits, along with its effect, the gig economy, has left more and more people without the resources to ride out the crisis.  Unemployment claims have skyrocketed to remarkable levels.  Neoliberal policy and practice have displaced alternative forms of rationality; public goods and solidarity are devalued in favor of individual capital; they return only in their ghostly mirror image of ethno-nationalistic anger.  Knowledge, both of nature (climate change, epidemiology) and of society are denied in the name of the populist wisdom of the president's gut.

Universities, of course, are deeply embedded in these crises--both the immediate and the long-term.  Colleges and universities across the country have moved to remote learning; moving staff, students, and faculty off-campus, shutting down labs, and, where they have medical centers trying to move as many resources as possible to support them.  Despite some skepticism, this was clearly the right thing to do.  But we should acknowledge the likely damage that it will cause: not only in student learning, but in financial resources, faculty and staff careers, scholarship disrupted if not derailed, and the damage to thinking together that is, or at least should be, the hallmark of the community of scholars.

At the same time, higher education has itself been embedded in growing inequality.  If knowledge is devalued, some part of that is due to the reality that colleges and universities have themselves contributed to inequality: seeking out prestige through selectivity, eagerly participating in the games of rankings, and turning towards satisfying the demands of donors over public needs.  This latter behavior, of course, is rooted in, and reinforces, the relative decline of public funding.  The return of the private took place in the decade following the dramatic expansion in the numbers of women and people of color on campus, not to mention the decade of student revolt.  Universities have been paying for this ever since.

But if higher education faces daunting challenges, it is not to soon to think about what we want in the aftermath of the pandemic.  There is an opportunity here for new thinking.  No, I don't mean giving in to the ed-tech gurus or those administrators now circling the crisis like vultures, wishing to strip away from students their residential education, and from faculty their control over curriculum and its forms. If the forced separation that Covid-19 has taught us anything it is that certain aspects of universities and colleges are essential and that they can only be saved by rethinking that which is not.

First, rather than proof that the future is online, the present retreat into distance learning is revealing the exact opposite.  Students have made clear exactly how much they value the residential experience-- just as faculty are remembering how important the shared classroom is for education.  The problem, as Chris and I have been arguing for years, is not the reality of in-person instruction but its lack of proper funding.  Universities will need to develop a new public contract; more people--not fewer--should be enabled to have the residential experience if they choose.  This means increasing public resources to reduce price across the whole spectrum of costs.

As I suggested a few weeks back in the days before Covid, universities especially need to more effectively defend the importance of research and graduate education across all disciplines.  Although attention now is focused appropriately on the search for medical remedies and care, the pandemic shows once again how deeply important knowledge of culture, politics, history, and society are for responding to crises, as those domains largely control the development of the crises themselves.  STEM is not going to answer the questions of the costs of privatization or the effects of the emphasis on commercialized tech transfer; nor will it help us solve the problem of homelessness or housing; or provide people with the perspective to learn from previous crises; nor, even on its own, enable us to try to prevent climate catastrophe.  Those are all eminently political and social problems and need to be understood as such.  Nor will STEM help UC address the ethical issues of allowing graduate students to lose their healthcare or live in their cars in the middle of a pandemic.  We need far more natural science--both pandemics and the climate crisis demand it.  But we need social and cultural knowledge as well.

To even begin to do these things, two large shifts will be necessary, if not sufficient, conditions. The first is an end to the pretense that tuition and philanthropy can overcome the challenges facing public higher education.  The rote repetition of some UC leaders that "free college is a dangerous idea," bears more than passing resemblance to the apocryphal "let them eat cake."

The same can be said for the repeated claims of UCOP that a tuition increase is better for poorer students than having the state buy it out.  This is true from one perspective of course--but it depends on concealing the fact that this situation is a result of a policy decision at OP, not built into the nature of things.  UC could just as easily decide to spend the same percentage of the state buyout on financial aid. They simply don't. 

But even these points remain trapped in the wrong ballpark.  States do have budget limitations; the answer is going to have to come in a new national contract.  I know that at the moment, with a knowledge-despising president and a science-denying party in control of the executive, judicial, and half of the legislative branch this seems like an impossibility.  But if the 2 trillion dollar stimulus should put paid to any myth, it is that Republicans care about budgets or deficits when their own access to public money is at stake.   Covid-19 increases the credibility, by the day, to modern monetary theory's notion that the real challenge in economic life is the underused capacity of the real economy.  From the Green New Deal to a new social contract for health and education, universities must take the lead.  Or they will have failed to live up to their name.

This will mean hard choices for the community of scholars as well.  Those colleges and universities who recover from this crisis will need to think deeply about their purposes and not simply fall back into patterns formed over the last several decades.  Managers will need to reject their dependence on precarious faculty whose numbers expanded in the name of market flexibility. Faculty will need to think through what is essential in their teaching and research organizations and the hyper-individualism and localism that they can fall prey to.  Both faculty and administration will need to rethink authority so that decisions are made by those--even within the university--who are closest to practice and knowledge.  And underlying all of these decisions and debates will lie the most important one: are colleges and universities--and those who work in them--going to continue to see who can triumph in the struggle for private prestige?  Or are they going to work to help produce a revitalized, and international, public good?

It will be the struggle of the 2020s.

You never know exactly where contradictory visions of higher ed are going to have an edifying head-on collision.  There was one last week in New Britain, Connecticut, where I had gone to speak at the annual meeting on shared  governance and student success of the Connecticut State Colleges and Universities system. It was organized by the wonderful program committee in the photo at left (photo thanks to Wanda Warshauer).

The overriding issue was the CSCU president's proposed consolidation of the state's community colleges into one college (with three regions, three presidents, twelve campus "CEOs" etc), a plan that continues to roil the system in spite of having been critiqued last year by the regional accreditor.  Meanwhile, in the morning, I called for a massive expansion of higher ed's social benefits, which I said would involve state buyouts of tuition and the funding of many more tenure-track instructors as well as more widely distributed research.   At lunch, Rep. Jahana Hayes (D-CT), of the first-year congressional cohort that includes Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Ilhan Omar, gave an excellent twelve-minute summation of the social power of education.  The question is, she said, were your students "important enough to you for you to stand in intercession until they could stand on their own" (11" here).  How do we free education from its current policy shackles? This is one of the great questions of our time.

Let's go in the order of the day.  At 9 am, my lecture argued that higher ed is undermining itself by focusing on only the most familiar fraction of its value, individual wage benefits.  Policy discourse leaves most of the story blank.

What's missing are the "external" or public pecuniary / monetary benefits (upper right quadrant), and all the non-pecuniary or non-market benefits, which are themselves more than half the total.  The focus on job training and wages by major is miseducating the public about what integrative higher learning really does.

The next hour featured a student panel that proved the point about non-monetary effects. Five students of varying ages described their non-traditional journeys to graduation over the kind of obstacles that our anti-social public policies have made all too common. The family of one speaker, who'd wanted to be a computer engineer, lost home and work in the 2008 crash when he was in the 7th grade.  The family spent years living in by-the-week motels as they went from city to city and state to state looking for permanent jobs. Meanwhile, their son never attended formal school again, until a GED program and various CSCU instructors helped him back into the system.

On the same panel a 53- year-old single mother said that after years of working she went back because "I got tired of other people controlling my livelihood. I knew that I could do more, be more.  I wanted to help people, and knew that I could be of greater help."

Three other speakers related their own struggles for education. The common issue: higher ed is about knowledge, capability, personal development.  It addresses a large and varying set of non-monetary issues.  Better pay plays an accepted but minor part, and on this panel was not central enough to mention.

I noted that none of these working-class students at working-class colleges mentioned that pecuniary metric du jour, upward mobility.  They focused on  Bildung, a word nobody used. It is mass Bildung: arguably the core higher ed goal is Bildung for all.

This brought us to Rep. Jahana Hayes. Her pre-Congress career was as a teacher, one who started as a teenage mom and then as a community college student who worked three jobs before graduating from Southern Connecticut State College, who then taught for years before becoming Connecticut Teacher of the Year and then 2016 National Teacher of the Year,  after which she ran for Congress, thinking it was a test run to prepare the ground for somebody else to run and win in 2020.

Her talk was anchored in a deep personal sense of the power of teachers to negate their students' self-worth with dismissive talk or treatment--or to make it possible for them to fully inhabit the world.  I came from a place, she said, where we were told in a range of ways you are nothing, your community is bad, your people have no value.  She said,

I have to remind people at every turn: nobody chooses to struggle. . . Our responsibility as leaders, as the adults, as the community is to hold people up until they can stand on their own, and then send them off so they can pull someone behind them. . . That's what happened in my life, when people stepped in. . . .

She said,

Everything I learned about school, I learned at school.  We have so many people who touch down on campuses like this, and for the first time have real conversations, with fidelity, about controlling the narrative about their education.  Just because they're not having those conversations at home doesn't mean their families don't care about them. Maybe it means, just maybe, that they don't have the ability or the capacity to control those conversations. 

I grew up in a family where my grandmother could not have been more loving, could not have been more giving, could not have been more invested in my success.  But she didn't know how to translate that level of investment, that level of commitment, that love she had for me, into a conversation that was academic. So as a teacher, I always stood on the premise that it's not kids' responsibility to learn different, it's my responsibility to teach different. And I think that if we always lead with that--that everybody has value, that everybody has a gift, that everybody gets to be here, and should have access,

and then she paused because she was on the verge of tears. So was I.  The whole room started to applaud.

She said,

it's amazing how raw this is for me, because. . . there were so many people, when I was a high school dropout, or I was a teenage mom, or I was a community college student, who had just given up on me and written me off. And I tell you, we can't write people off.  We can't decide that they're done. What we have to do is figure out how to put them back on track, and get them in the pipeline, and on the road to success and that road is going to look different for everybody.  There are different ways of doing and being.

And once you are graced with--when I started this journey I did it because I was the beneficiary of so much undeserved grace. Now I have a responsibility--I have a responsibility to use my voice, to use my platform, to use my experiences, to use my struggle, to help insure that somebody, even if it's one person, does not have to endure the same things. To help change hearts and minds, so that the people on the other side, who have already made up their minds, they have an opinion about who certain groups are, what certain groups do, how certain groups feel--about how people act--to help them change that opinion. . . .

In a conference the other day . . . I had to remind people that I was a SNAP beneficiary--not because I didn't want to work, but because I was underemployed, working three jobs, going to college full time. So  when you think about someone receiving SNAP benefits, I hope that you now begin to think that that person can become a Congresswoman. There are so many people in this room, there are so many people on this campus, there are so many people in this community, who are in the journey.

Jahana Hayes would not deny education as job benefits, even as that was subsumed by education as a journey whose supreme value she had proved.  I was struck by her fully democratized idea of value--"everybody has a gift"--that cannot be dealt with through standardization, which is, as an administrative reflex, itself bound up with marginalization.  Thus we get to her principle of "teach different." And that is essentially what every talk I heard all day was doing.

In the afternoon, I went to the panel on "Creating a Family-Friendly Campus," with presentations about basic issues like easily accessible lactation rooms and free child care by Meredith Sinclair, State Senator Beth Bye, and Fiona Pearson, who previewed arguments from her forthcoming book, Back in School. 

There was also Laura McCarthy's presentation on transition programs for what are sometimes called at-risk students.  The programs initially had low retention and completion rates. The instructors did a reoganization based on their immersive experience, and these rates got much better.  Here are some principles:

Free -- hmm, interesting idea. In conjunction with the others, which are all Hayes Principles. Mass Bildung.

Here's what we the instructional masses looks like--with Wanda again playing Waldo, and CCSU president Toro on the left.

And there was also the look on Jahana Hayes's face when I said, "at some point we'll be needing you back in education." 

"I do miss it," she laughed.

I said she showed why her crew could change the frame in Congress: they could end the hollowing out of social structures precisely by invoking the capabilities of absolutely everyone.  It's the Great Refusal of racist and related social stigmas on which neoliberalism depends.

At the end of the day, the Faculty Advisory Committee to the Board of Regents had a session on the issue overhanging the day--the president's CC consolidation.  It seems to have started with the claim that the consolidation could save tens of millions of dollars on a half-billion or so of a system operating budget.  It led, however, with the motto of "Students First," arguing that consolidation would allow simple student access to multiple campuses.  I mentioned above that the regional accreditor seriously challenged the proposal last year, but it is back in retooled form, with a simultaneous plan to conform all 12 campuses' curricula to a Guided Pathways template.

My own limited reading on the issue didn't explain what problem they have to which the solution is consolidation + Guided Pathways.  One good newspaper overview is here.  A faculty petition with concise opposing arguments is here.  The systemwide update document is here, where a slide summary starts on p 39; a key slide at 47 claims the system must be consolidated to solve a student registration process with 35 separate steps.  (One faculty member told me the slide is "ridiculous"; another said, "even if the 35 steps are real, students to whom it would apply constituted 1.12 percent of the student body in Fall 2018" . . . with an average of 1.3 percent.)

The consolidation uses the faculty's language of "student success," but otherwise is a managerial initiative that seemed unrelated to the educational issues we were discussing.  It felt to me like a legacy project.  The system president who's championing the plan, Mark E. Ojakian, was the previous governor's Chief of Staff when, in 2011, he was assigned to create the current CSCU system by pushing the community colleges into a common structure with the four-year campuses. No one had much good to say about the results then--nor could anyone point me to evidence of financial savings.  That same governor later appointed Ojakian to be the president of the system he'd created, and now he's back for a second rearrangement of the arms and legs of his creature.

I spoke to him briefly at the start of the day: he was pleasant but uninvolved, and disappeared quickly (unlike the chair of the Board of Regents, who stuck around and chatted with me and various attendees).  The consolidation was not developed in consultation with faculty and staff on the campuses.  Hence the head-on collision between unrelated models of problems and solutions coming from frontline people on the one hand and a politically-wired system office on the other.  The results are predictable: demoralization and confusion, and a low chance of meaningful results.

It also seems like an example of the sort of pragmatism that finds its problems under the proverbial lamppost, and so ignores the bigger problems in the shadows.  It doesn't actually seem pragmatic to me.  So I used my talk to insist that debates in higher ed today were not between realism and idealism, but between two kinds of realism.  The dominant one is a realpolitik, whose opening move is always to cast its opposition as well-intentioned but naive about real-world rules.  But what this move is really trying to forestall is actualy a competing realism.  I called this "public realism" (still fussing with terrminology).  Public realism is much more ambitious than realpolitik, wanting among other things adequate funding for all of higher ed's nonpecuniary effects, which means high quality instruction and research at what are now thousands of underfunded open access institutions much like the ones Ojakian wants to consolidate.

Consolidation is a realpolitik distraction from the real issue, which is that Connecticut, though the No. 1 richest state by our preferred funding metric of personal income, has cut its funding for its CCs by nearly 12 percent just in the last four years.  The longer trend is dismal: though Connecticut appropriations are above national averages, they are still 19 percent below their 2008 levels, while tuition is 41 percent higher.  Here's the SHEEO wave chart for CT:

A group of faculty described this root problem in an editorial that should be read in full:

In an historical context, the apparent fiscal crisis that precipitated the [Board of Regents’] Students First plan grew out of years of declining levels of state support for higher education that became especially acute in the aftermath of the 2008-2009 economic crisis. The state’s eroding budgetary condition imposed fiscal austerity on the system that simultaneously resulted in increases in students’ costs/debts and cutbacks in student services and opportunities.  Full time professors were replaced by adjuncts; retiring academic advisors were not replaced; hours of operation were reduced.

Educational quality declines when capacity declines: it's realpolitik's own idealism to think otherwise.  

The Connecticut system's related root problem is that it's not affordable.  From the California vantage, Connecticut charges very high tuition for community college- over $4400 a year.  (True, it is half the tuition charged by community college in New York State, but I'm sure we can agree that $10,000 a year for first-rung local college is insane.)

Ojakian might thus have been expected to focus on two things as president: lowering tuition and raising state allocations in wealthy Connecticut.   (He could also have taken care of student bureaucratic hassles the old-fashioned way, by quietly instituting a common application form, which I'm told by faculty and students was promised when he formed the system back in 2011.) But these two issuse are not the leadership's focus.  The day's last session was dominated by faculty distress at a process that they feel is headed in the wrong direction in part because they have been excluded from it.

I'd said that we had been avoiding the effort to fund public colleges as public goods, which had meant the path of "multiple revenue streams" (aka privatization).  The key point is that none of these have  worked out as promised. I counted 12 types.


 There are exceptions to the rules in the "reality" column, but I believe these are the general rules.  Most relevant to consoidation is the second item from the last: I mentioned UCPath as a disaster that emerges from a type top-down standardization that blocks local efficiencies and if anything increases costs while making everyone's job harder. Decentralization is often more efficient than consolidation: UC Berkeley's failed Operation Excellence is UC's Exhibit A (see Section 3 for a 2016 update).

There are some things we can do to avoid these mistakes.  A simple one is policy rooted in history and evidence. Can you show that your last reorg saved a lot of money? Do you have an example of positive top-down curricular standardization?  If not, do you have a detailed plan that convinces the people actually doing the education? If you have none of these things, talk to people all over the system and try out something else.

Another is telling the truth about the damage these public-private hybrid models have already done.  It's the old Step 1 beginning: first admit you have a problem.  We have a national higher ed realpolitik, that failed.  Frontline faculty and staff have faced this. Top level admin should do the same.

The third thing we can do is a full reframing of higher ed along public good lines.  Virtually everyone I heard speak that day, from Jahana Hayes on out, already sees the transformation that would come from that.