The University After Capitalism

Chancellor Zimpher,

You’re just not listening.

When you said that the PHEEIA “shields our students and our campuses from the worst effects of the fiscal crisis” you didn’t consider the fact that the legislation encourages tuition hikes (which are historically preceded and followed by budget cuts). Hikes that will hurt only those least able to afford public education– the very same people who are struggling most during this fiscal crisis. The PHEEIA doesn’t shield anybody. In fact, it adds insult to injury.

When you said that the PHEEIA “enables SUNY to engage in partnerships with the private sector, which means new revenue to support SUNY and the ability to create 2,000 faculty positions and a total of 10,000 jobs across the system — along with 65,000 construction jobs for capital projects” you forgot that we, the students, told you that the road to privatization puts profit above education. Students are not customers. Professors are not tools. The university is not a factory.

When you say that the PHEEIA “promotes transparency and accountability in our business transactions” what you mean is that it promotes business transactions and elevates them above the need for a real, affordable public higher education. You mean that it strips the legislators of power and thrusts it into the hands of the SUNY Board of Trustees who are not elected, but are appointed. This is not “empowerment” nor “innovation”. This is a corporate coup.

“Unfortunately, some critics continue to defend an indefensible status quo…”

You are the administration. You are the status quo. The SUNY system has been marching down the path of privatization through a convenient feedback loop of budget cuts and tuition hikes for three decades. You’re just putting the nail in the coffin.

“…providing no alternative solutions — only criticisms.”

Try here. Or, more specifically, here.

“If current projections are accurate, there will be even less money to go around next year.”

No kidding? Maybe it has something to do with your acquiescence. New York State raises tuition and then factors the tuition raise into its budget allowing it to “justify” cuts.

“Business as usual will be nothing short of disastrous.”

So, why are you trying to speed it along?

“The Empowerment Act protects students with a comprehensive tuition policy that will enable them to plan ahead for tuition costs. Historically, tuition has gone up the most during tough times, when families can least afford it.”

The Disempowerment Act allows the SUNY Board of Trustees to slowly raise tuition over time in order to increase long-term yields without drawing the ire of the students. By 2020 it will have effectively doubled tuition. The only thing that” families who can least afford” education can” plan ahead for” is not sending their kids to college or being saddled with tons of debt.

“Our tuition plan will maintain affordability and accessibility. We are in the process of developing a detailed tuition policy that would cap total year-to-year tuition increases, while protecting access with expanded financial aid.”

How does gradually increasing the tuition maintain affordability and accessibility? The “cap” for year-to-year tuition increases will be 2.5 times higher than the current HEPI rate. Expanded financial aid sounds nice in theory but the fact of the matter is that it is the role of a public higher education system to serve the needs of the least able, not put education just out of their fiscal reach and then shower crumbs upon them.

“These reforms will not “give the state permission to cut SUNY.” The steady erosion of support shows that the state long ago gave itself permission to cut SUNY.”

Tricky wording here. The reforms won’t give permission to the state to cut SUNY but the reforms also do not prevent the state from cutting from SUNY. What you mean to say here is that SUNY can make up for slashed state support by placing the burden on students.

“During this fiscal hurricane, we simply cannot afford to stake everything on the hope of budget restorations. To do so will lead to diminished access, erosion of academic quality and economic stagnation.”

Instead we should entirely abandon the idea of public higher education, transform the SUNY system into one that caters to fiscal matters and put providing affordable education on the backburner, right? You’re basically saying here that we should just give up on public education.

“When I was hired by the board of trustees, I pledged to “press the reset button” on SUNY’s way of doing business.”

So you mean that you want to restore all state funding to the SUNY system, lower tuition and throw out the idea of letting the private sector invade our public institutions?

You’re obviously not listening. So, we’re going to make you.

11:30

Organizers are made aware that university police received word of the intentions of the protestors to storm the CEWIT building to interrupt a press conference. Speculation over whether a police officer had been a member of the online group or an individual within the group had forwarded information to university police.

12:00

Six to eight police officers spotted in the SAC lobby. Organizers gather in the SAC plaza and begin distributing signs.

12:50

Rally begins. Speakers from the RA Union, undergraduate and graduate student bodies and the UUP.

1:20

Students march across the academic mall and passed the Administration building chanting. They gather on a bus which delivers two groups to the CEWIT building located on south campus.

1:40

Approximately 100 students arrive at the CEWIT building where they’re herded like cattle into a “free-speech zone” on the very wet and muddy lawn. Students take the line chanting and shouting.

1:50

One of the police officers is recognized by a number of people as having RSVP’d the event. We found our rat. Students shout “who’s the rat?” and as if to confirm our suspicions, the bastard smiles and the other cops look in his direction.

2:00

People begin exiting the conference including the university president to whom students were able to successfully deliver the open letter posted below.

2:10

Crowds disipate with plans to attend strategy sessions tomorrow for actions to be taken next week.

Bottom-left corner got caught in the gutter...

“SUNY AGAINST THE CUT$ WE WILL WIN”

March 2nd

Students hopped around a large wood barrier on the Union staircase and went up onto the roof. After dropping the banner, using a bike chain they were able to lock the doors behind them from inside to prevent anyone from taking the banner down. As of midnight the banner still hangs.

One of the many reasons for the quickness with which the state moves to reduce the funding of its schools is an awareness of students’ passive–even ignorant–attitudes toward their collective social status as students. It is sometimes said that students cannot form a class because of the temporal nature of their situation. Students are always looking forward, identifying pro actively with what they hope to become, and as a result neglect their current status. Often, they hold no jobs, and those who do hate their jobs, dreading the wasted hours behind a cash register, for example, but seeing it as a necessary evil.

An awareness of this can guide our efforts. If students identify as future journalists, artists, teachers, researchers, etc., we should start by appealing to them as such. Show what awaits. This is not an economic conflict, where wage earners fight their bosses for better pay and better conditions. The fact that tuition may go up $600 dollars is largely met with indifference. Instead, the conflict is almost entirely social. What is needed now is to unmask the social conditions that await by revealing the obsolescence of deeply entrenched attitudes about education, attitudes that come mainly from the working class of previous generations who saw a college education as a ticket to the middle class.

How many English majors are out there, for example, with the illusion that they might one day get paid to immerse themselves in reading and writing? How many business majors are living in denial about their prospects? Even the grad student’s hope of making it into academe, to live the “Life of the Mind” is now just an hallucination. A recent article from the Chronicle of Higher Education describes one student’s struggle:

She was the best student her adviser had ever seen (or so he said); it seemed like a dream when she was admitted to a distinguished doctoral program; she worked so hard for so long; she won almost every prize; she published several essays; she became fully identified with the academic life; even distancing herself from her less educated family. For all of those reasons, she continues as an adjunct who qualifies for food stamps, increasingly isolating herself to avoid feelings of being judged. Her students have no idea that she is a prisoner of the graduate-school poverty trap. The consolations of teaching are fewer than she ever imagined.

Students in California are putting the emphasis on the fact that we’ve become “damaged goods,” thrown into a hopeless job market where delayed periods of unemployment are thought by employers to be corrupting. This is probably the right first step. Shatter the illusion. Another recent article by Don Peck in the Atlantic, “How a New Jobless Era Will Transform America,” gives an analysis of the effect recessions have on youth entering the workforce:

[A] whole generation of young adults is likely to see its life chances permanently diminished by this recession. Lisa Kahn, an economist at Yale, has studied the impact of recessions on the lifetime earnings of young workers. In one recent study, she followed the career paths of white men who graduated from college between 1979 and 1989. She found that, all else equal, for every one-percentage-point increase in the national unemployment rate, the starting income of new graduates fell by as much as 7 percent; the unluckiest graduates of the decade, who merged into the teeth of the 1981-82 recession, made roughly 25 percent less in their first year than graduates who stepped into boom times.

But what’s truly remarkable is the persistence of the earnings gap. Five, 10, 15 years after graduation, after untold promotions and career changes spanning booms and busts, the unlucky graduates never closed the gap. Seventeen years after graduation, those who had entered the workforce during inhospitable times were still earning 10 percent less on average than those who had emerged into a more bountiful climate. When you add up all the earnings losses over the years, Kahn says, it’s as if the lucky graduates had been given a gift of about $100,000, adjusted for inflation, immediately upon graduation or, alternatively, as if the unlucky ones had been saddled with a debt of the same size.

It’s difficult–maybe impossible–to see anything promising in the present or the future. Shit is fucked up. As students from Boston have put it, “The only assurance we have in the present future is uncertainty. The uncertainty of whether we are able to complete college. The uncertainty of getting a job after graduating. The uncertainty of having enough food to feed ourselves. The uncertainty of living life. Only these uncertainties are for certain.”

But in unmasking this reality, we create new possibilities for the future. Our vacant futures can unite us. In shattering our dreams, the present conditions force us to see ourselves not pro actively, taking on the identity of what we hope to be, but actively, as what we are: students who share a common struggle.

Occupations and walk-outs become meaningless without this context. The attack on public education depends in the first place on student identity, or student consciousness. So also does the fight against it.