Occupied Higher Ed

Higher education has within it two contradictory threads. On the one hand there is the tradition which views education in general (and higher education in particular) as the place where transformation can occur, where intellectual and psychological liberation can occur, where people have a chance to raise their consciousness—as we used to call sharpening our perceptions and critiques of the world. Sometimes these personal changes can happen through engagement with faculty—as Neil Postman hoped for in his classic book Teaching as a Subversive Activity—but they also take place through students’ own intentions to wrestle with reality in community with their fellows. 

Another current within higher education sees the realm not as a way to create and recreate ourselves and our communities by the cultivation of critical analysis and the development of individual potential and the greater common good. In this view, higher education becomes a source of credentials. Businesses and employers want employees who have paid for their own training and who show up not only pre-prepared for employment, but also pre-sorted by their degrees and grades. 

Through the explosion of this credential-generating and industry-serving vision of college, the possibilities for higher education to be about the growth of intellectual horizons is getting squeezed. Grants flow to biotechnology and endowments come earmarked for business schools. Not so many students feel they can afford to be a philosophy major when they suspect that they will need a degree in computers or an MBA to make a decent living. 

If you want to get ahead, the story goes, go to school. If you get a degree, you can get a job with decent pay and benefits. If your child graduates from college, they can live a better life than you did. Just don’t wonder why the essential jobs of our society—like picking up trash or taking care of kids or growing food—don’t provide decent pay and decent benefits. Don’t wonder why bathing and feeding sick people or fixing cars aren’t lives with dignity that parents are proud to pass on to their children. 

Now, in the days of Occupy, students are beginning to feel cheated. Again. In the 20th century, young people across the world have pursued university degrees only to find that there is no pot of gold at the end of that rainbow. Revolutions have been fed by betrayed students from China to Egypt to Iran, as their sense of betrayal widened into larger critiques of those social orders which deceived them. Suicides have resulted, too, such as the self-immolations of students just months ago in Morocco. Here in the U.S., the disillusioned Occupy Student Debt movement is challenging Americans to refuse to pay their school loans and to push for more government funding for education. 

While in much of the rest of the developed world, the private rather than public nature of much of American higher education is a cause for scandal, our scenario goes even further into shameful territory. Even what passes for public universities in this country has gone, over the last decades:   

• From being close to free to costing over half the yearly income of
  the poorest fifth of Americans   
   
• To devoting most of their teaching and research to training a workforce
  for the needs of the private sector, not to cultivating an informed citizenry  

• To employing armies of adjunct professors who get paid so little that
  they can qualify for food stamps   

We have now an arms race for an ever-receding entry level of education. What a high school diploma sufficed for a generation ago now requires a bachelor’s. A master’s is the new bachelor’s. And in this growth market for degrees, even marginally public universities are being crowded by a for-profit educational complex which dangles supposedly career-generating diplomas in front of would-be students, coaxing and conning them into signing on to loans often underwritten by taxpayers—echoing the larger American push towards the privatization of the public. 

In this scenario, the understanding of a college education as a basic human right rather than a commodity has much to recommend it. But so far, much of current student frustration pivots on the idea that access to education is access to social mobility. Greater access to college is advocated on the moral foundation that everyone deserves a chance to rise in the world, not that everyone deserves the right to work and the right to a living wage. Hence, underlying much of the current student debt movement is an accepted principle that the path forward for overworked, underpaid, and disrespected Americans lies in the individual pursuit of educational credentials. The complaints lie largely in the difficulties of the pursuit of those credentials, and the bait and switch nature of the rewards for them. The right-wing mantra of America as the land of opportunities—not guarantees—passes without note, while the International Labor Organization’s almost 15-year-old campaign for the human right to decent work has not taken off in this country. Rather, we scramble, via “education,” to claw our way out of the indecent work vailable to us. 

Granting diplomas will never challenge structural inequality and a class system; the promotion of education as a solution to inequality absolves the policies which created those inequalities. Lost, too, is the corollary observation that higher education serves as a gatekeeper for and marker of entry to the middle class, not as a creator of the middle class. Classes are created by politics and economics, not schools. 

Meanwhile, we have come to believe that those who stay on the bottom of the social pile must have failed to get an education and that those who went to “good schools” deserve elite jobs and all that goes with them. Educational stratification legitimates social stratification. As John Marsh puts it in his book Class Dismissed: Why We Cannot Teach or Learn Our Way Out of Inequality, “appeals to education have displaced the debate about social class and economic power that Americans need to have.” 

Higher education faces a fork in the road. Will colleges and universities, hoping for a piece of the expanding traffic in students and searching for an easy path to greater public subsidies and corporate handouts, play along with the myth that they are the solution to inequality? That what we really need is to improve people, not improve jobs? Or will they become part of the movements for living wages and for decent work for all people, degreed or no? 

Talking with a friend about the responsibilities of higher education in the era of Occupy, she asked me what it would actually look like for colleges to not only reject the corporatization of academia, but to actually become part of these struggles for a more just world. Are colleges only responsible to promote critical thinking, she wondered? Is that constricted sense of academic mission really different at all from the old commitment to the liberal arts, which, admirable though it may be on some levels, has failed so often to become part of larger movements against inequality? How might the engagement of colleges with the moral issue of our day actually come to pass? 

In the spirit of Occupy, I will not propose any answers, but suggest, instead, that my friend’s questions are just the ones for Occupiers to take up. How should educational institutions be structured? What are students and staff and faculty’s responsibilities towards each other and to the public, to politics, to the economy and society? What, at long last, is the role of the intellectual in society? At this moment, it isn’t just intellectuals who are asking this question, but the Occupy movement as well. What will our answers be? That is up to us. 

Z

 Eva Swidler is an environmental historian and faculty advisor in the interdisciplinary bachelor of arts program at Goddard College.