Category: Communiqués

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Communiqués

Painting the Glass House Black

http://www.metamute.org/en/content/painting_the_glass_house_black

By Evan Calder Williams

Everything I wish to own becomes opaque to me. – André Gide

In California, over the past six months, the struggle to ‘defend public education’ has become something very different. On 24 September 2009, thousands of students, staff, workers and faculty across the University of California (UC) system walked out in protest of fee hikes, layoffs, furloughs and cuts to departments and services. At the end of that day, a group of students and teachers entered the Graduate Student Commons building at UC Santa Cruz and occupied it for a week. The months to come saw a sequence of direct actions up and down the state, too many to detail here in this brief sketch.1 Later in September and October, there were study-ins, sit-ins and open occupations at libraries in the UC and California State University (CSU) system. In November, while the UC Regents met at UCLA to discuss – and ultimately approve – a 32 percent fee hike, as well as further cuts and layoffs, campuses erupted across the state, setting off an intense three-day wave of occupations, marches, sit-ins, blockades, demonstrations, arrests and shut-downs in Davis, Los Angeles, Santa Cruz, Berkeley, Fresno and San Francisco. Students are holding assemblies and arguing about what to do and how, dropping banners that declare WE ARE THE CRISIS, angering some, inspiring others. They throw dance parties in common spaces and wear masks to hide their faces. They write anonymous texts and analyse together. They make demands they know won’t be met, and they refuse to make demands. There are solidarity marches in New York City and Vienna, two cities where university occupations before and during this period furthered the sense of a general crisis, as well as an explicitly anti-capitalist response, that exceeds the particular ‘budget squeeze’ of California.

In December, students at San Francisco State University occupied the Business Building and renamed it Oscar Grant Memorial Hall after a young black man shot and killed by police a year prior. The ‘Live Week’ at Berkeley, where Wheeler Hall was held open during the ‘dead week’ before finals, ended when police came in the early morning and arrested the occupiers. That night, a group marched with torches to the Chancellor’s mansion. In the new year: library sit-ins at Davis, arrests and police confrontations at a benefit party for prior arrestees in San Francisco, a street party and riot in Berkeley following an occupation, and tireless planning for the long anticipated statewide strike on 4 March and week of actions. The 4th was a day of massive marches, rallies, demonstrations, and occupations as students blocked entrances to their schools, made it possible for workers to join the picket lines, brought businesses to a halt, and spilled from their campuses into their cities and, in Oakland and Davis, onto the freeways.

What follows are a few observations from one living here in Santa Cruz through these months of struggles over what education is and what the real negation of capitalist relations can be. This is neither a representation of the ‘ultra-left’ milieu as a whole nor my unique contribution.2 And this isn’t a remotely complete summary of either what’s happened or the theories which impelled or analysed such events.3

Instead, I offer a short set of thoughts around the potential connections between two ‘isations’: financialisation, especially as it shapes the university, and communisation (a practice of communist measures of collectivity and secession from capital that doesn’t wait for a communist revolution), especially as it has emerged in connection with the recent upsurge of anti-capitalist currents in California and elsewhere in the US.4 Above all, I look toward this in terms of what is ultimately a practical struggle to elaborate, and displace, a fraught dialectic between the transparency and opacity of contemporary capitalism.

To claim that ‘financialisation’ (the increased prevalence of producing ‘value’ by passing capital through financial instruments and institutions) is an overarching structure that determines the shape of the university, especially in the UC, California State University (CSU) and California Community College (CCC) systems, doesn’t require allegiance to a conspiratorial follow-the-money tendency. It’s a fact, and one largely avowed by those who’ve helped steer the public education system here into the shoals. In July 2009, the UC Board of Regents – the corporate entity that governs the UC and through whose name the money flows – declared a ‘state of financial emergency’, granted emergency powers to UC President Mark Yudof, and set in motion the most recent round of tuition hikes, layoffs, furloughs and cuts that augmented the general sense that the ongoing crisis of the public education’s ‘value’ had become an emergency, albeit one hastened by those very emergency measures. By all accounts, the worst is yet to come. Barring a near unthinkable change of course, the unmistakable air of anxiety across the state will find its suspicions more than bleakly confirmed this year and next: all reasonable estimates point toward further, and more severe fee hikes, lay-offs, furloughs, budgetary contractions, departmental closures, increased reliance on the higher tuition fees of non-resident students, fewer classes offered and more students packed into those classes.

However, a drastic, or even moderate shift, in the management style of the UC and the financial mechanisms on which it depends is unthinkable but not for the often-cited reason of the greed and incompetence of the Regents, however true both designations are. Rather, this is a ‘state of emergency’ in a more old-school Marxist sense: it’s just business as usual. The privatisation of the UC system is neither shocking nor new.5 On the contrary, to envision these new measures as exceptional buys into the narrative peddled by Yudof and the Regents: just a few lean years, we all need to sacrifice a bit, and all together now…

Yet one shouldn’t dismiss the specificity of how ‘financialisation’ feeds into this narrative of exception and the broader crisis of capitalist reproduction.6 We need to ask: how does it affect the university as such (and the positions of its students and workers), and how do these effects relate to the wider crisis of profitability behind the trend toward increased reliance on financialised capital?

Underlying the litany of real and urgent concerns about quality of life and education lies a more diffuse problem, that of a tension and slippage between the transparent and the opaque, both as concepts that describe the operations of capital and as experiences of every day life that grapple with such operations.7 What do I mean by this? It’s been shown that the extra capital raised by hiking student fees and slashing workers’ hours will not go to alleviating the particular problems faced by those groups. Rather, these ‘cost-saving measures’ were made at the behest of credit agencies so as to maintain a good bond rating and invest in ‘capital projects’8: above all, construction of research facilities to bring building contracts, outside firms and a further push toward the envisioned privatisation of the system as a whole. Yet what’s at stake here goes beyond both the fact that the intended projects (biomedical, military, etc.) are anathema to the ‘left’ and that the situation demands individual students take out more loans, at a higher rate of interest, to allow the Regents to continue to borrow at a lower rate.9 Rather, it is a further extension of financialisation’s basic move: the decoupling of monetary ‘cause and effect’. Or, in a different register, of capital invested to supposed worth gained.

Obviously, this isn’t structurally new in the least. What’s new is the affective texture of it, the mode of comportment – that is, humiliation – required to deal with an apparatus of self-reproduction that so baldly flaunts its opacity. It obfuscates the tangled web, particularity its operations, but not their vast distance from the explicit reasons given for paying more and earning less. The problem isn’t that almost no one ‘gets’ the alchemical intricacies of contemporary finance, but rather that it won’t let any of us forget the asserted fact of its unknowability. We’re asked to peer in and to see nothing other than a procedural apparatus ‘too complicated to explain’. Nothing other than the dark echo of feeling cheated. Who can be surprised, then, that many of the demands put to the UC system, and the subsequent elation of some when it was announced that it would be audited, centre around that obscure object of desire hidden from public view: the budget. As if the curtain will be thrown back, light will shine through and all will become clear. As if we were still capable of surprise.

But what’s there to see anyway? This isn’t to disavow the necessary work of untangling the rat’s nest of money or the recognition that ‘spectral’ operations of fictitious capital have profound effects, above all the loss of jobs and homes. But the opacity of financialisation is declarative. And we shouldn’t trust either naturalised accounts of it, that it is the regenerative future of capitalism – the triumph of the immaterial and spectral, moving phantom capital across borders with ease – or that it is genuinely opaque and dense. For it is not the shape of a new mode of production or phase in capital: this brash and tenuous architecture of the present is ultimately a glass house. Not just the glass ceiling of foreclosed access, not just the glass floor between production and reproduction but an entire set of walls and barriers that hide nothing.10 We can’t know all the arcane methods of its construction, but we can see straight through it. Mistaken for opacity is the warped, constant image refracted through it: the fact that it doesn’t work, that this form of speculation and risk badly veils the older story of declining profitability and the total crisis of the system.

It is an obstinate, hostile nothing that can’t be known, because it isn’t a regime of production itself. Only a set of relations, extractions and circulations erected over industrial capital’s slow-motion failure. The ‘absent future’ written of here in California isn’t just a wintry metaphor to capture how it feels to be a student or worker confronting the years to come. It’s the reality of a situation in which, as of January, 6.3 million Americans had been out of work for longer than six months, the California unemployment rate (12.5 percent) is the highest on record, and only 46 percent of those between the ages of 16-24 had jobs – the lowest since the count began in 1948. The absent future is doubly the end of seemingly profitable speculation on the future, and the end of work for increasing numbers of those made yet more desperate by the contraction of easily available household credit.

Communisation, then, is also the end of work. Not a theory to be enacted but a set of experiments without end, not a project to be fulfilled but a rejection remade anew each time. It elaborates labour’s negation, working out capital’s collapse through the recognition that it can have no determinate collapse. No longer the thought of revolution per se, imagining we can shatter this glass house and build anew, or leave it behind for a phantom clarity of simpler things. Rather, this is the practice of occupying the house and painting it black, with unsure, messy, shared actions that test and stain the transparent forms of the present to better see where we stand.11 To stretch and strain past what is legitimate toward the possibility of having more in common than the fear of what’s to come.

That’s the drift, anyhow. And it points us to the immediate question: is that really the case in California? Are these events of ‘real’ secession and disruption able to subtract sites from the flows of capital through obstruction and the abolition of ourselves as students, workers, non-workers, radicals? Why is the set of thoughts around communisation suddenly visible in struggles here, along with new faces and stated anti-capitalist agendas in the midst of a struggle for affordable public education? Is this what communisation looks like?

The most honest answer can only be: we really don’t know. Not because we don’t think about this, but because we haven’t done this sort of thing before, and each time we try something, push further and regroup, forge new circuits of friendship or dissolve other patterns and allegiances, each time a text is written, a banner dropped, a door barricaded, the situation changes. We can rather simply answer the banal question of why all these ‘young people’ in California are reading, and framing parts of this movement in terms of, texts associated with European ultra-left/insurrectionary anarchist trajectories – Tiqqun/Invisible Committee, Dauvé and Nesic, Théorie Communiste, Debord, strands of Italian autonomia, TPTG, so on.12 First, a question of personal transmission: these texts matter to a number of people who’ve been involved in the struggles here, and they’ve shared them with friends because they see them as relevant to the situation.13 Second, and perhaps more importantly, there is a nearly accidental consonance: the concrete situations analysed may be different, yet something echoes between, for example, an attempt to grasp the limits of anti-CPE struggles in France and the limits of education struggles here. But one shouldn’t presume a naïve application of theory to a different context, as if a ‘how to communise the contemporary catastrophe’ handbook was read and mutely applied. It is indeed a genuine tension to not become frozen in a glance to the East, constantly checking our sparks against what often seem like hotter fires on the Continent. And moreover, to find a mode of articulation that doesn’t feel like rehash: my own writing and thinking is plagued by this difficult task of grounding itself here, on this terrain both too familiar to be noticed and too mutable, marked by every attempt to take hold of it.

But if our writing falters, these discontinuous, searching and explosive moments of disruption and collective action, willing to try beyond the stale dysphoria of feared error, succeed. It isn’t that they are going to achieve a set goal or ‘save’ public education, although it’s certain that they have been instrumental in calling wider attention to these issues and have helped put direct-action tactics back on the table after a long hiatus. It isn’t that they express the general will, although the past six months have traced the arc from a few ‘adventurists’ to swarms of those who can now start to envisage materially displacing an order of work, school, debt and rent, along with the crippling anxiety about the loss of opportunities that order enabled. It isn’t that they laid bare basic truths of state repression, although we’ve watched friends get jailed and hurt. It isn’t that they expose the buried power lines of property and power (although California has now seen its students seize buildings and blockade highways and campuses), because they thought that this disruption would bring out the differences between what is public in practice and public in name alone. No, if they succeed, it’s for other reasons. For they’ve ventured a key double principle:

Even moderate reforms – to education, to the patterns of finance and construction – will only be possible with mass disruption of ‘business as usual’.

The mass required for this mass disruption will only emerge through acts of disruption, in the shared experience of the general strike, the rent, tuition, and debt strike, the occupation, the street party, the sit-in, the walk-out, the auto-reduction, the wildcat, the riot, and the blockade.

Not that such actions are magically transformative, producing this mass ex nihilo, or that such negations automatically articulate a ‘positive’ content. And it’s true that such actions, divisive and threatening as they can be, will create rifts in populations. But with those experiences and with these rifts come also the occasions for conversations before, during and after attempts to think things through which such a mass coalesces. It is the recognition that no amount of planning can tell us what will happen – and as such, what matters is to try – and ceaselessly try to situate ourselves again in a landscape formed of such trials and the inertial blockages they encounter.

More starkly, the measure of success is the undermining of the category of success. In the contemporary climate, what would such a category even mean? To be sure, there are major gains to be made – concrete improvements to public education, better wages and conditions for its employees, networks of mutual aid and solidarity for those grappling most with debt and poverty. One of the senses of the slogan – WE WANT EVERYTHING – central to these past months, a slogan taken above all as a declaration to not settle for anything less than negation of the whole structural order, is also that we want everything along the way: we want workers to be treated fairly, we want school to be free, we want to never work, we want to learn without degrees, we want debt canceled, we want to bring it all to a halt so we can see where we stand and start otherwise. Because, crucially, there can be no end-goal: to speak of ‘insurrection’ shouldn’t be to speak of a far-off horizon to come, but rather a process of trying and testing, of leaving behind and digging in. Is what’s happening here a successful start to ‘communisation’? Not in any determinate way measurable against some template or text. What’s happened here, in the centre and on the periphery of a struggle over public education and financialisation, isn’t anything that looks like full appropriation and redistribution of materials, and it isn’t the full secession of pockets of friends and comrades from the circuits of work and school.

But like the moments in Vienna and Athens, Zagreb and New York, Mexico City and Marseilles, this is on our own terrain and our own terms, terrain and terms we can’t know other than through the experiments of our small breakdowns and flare-ups. It’s an alternate cartography of California just getting started, and it can’t be measured by writings from afar, or even from nearby. Rather, what happens keeps outstripping what was supposed to happen, as it’s necessarily inflected by the particular settings and the context of emerging from the university to push toward other grounds. Old tactics and slogans are used differently, and new ones stumbled upon. And, appropriately, with a very West Coast bent to it all: dance party becomes open code for illegal occupation, and during a riot in Berkeley, a few ‘ghost ride the whip’, the Bay Area hip hop-derived practice of dancing on and alongside a driverless car as it moves ahead in gear. Goofy, sure, but also a distinctly Californian figure of communisation, at first glimpse, a homegrown critique of the financialised present.14 The auto lurches forward, there’s no driver at the wheel, no direction or reason: for we have got out. No longer stuck in deadlocked traffic, not guarding from within the sanctity of the leased vehicle, not just waiting for the crash to come harder, not trudging home, but out there, taking pleasure together with others who know this can’t go on. From the glass house to the empty car, learning how to take and make shelter otherwise, leaving the motor wheezing as we join each other in the street. How does this end? We can’t know. But there’s only one way to find out.

Evan Calder Williams is a theorist and graduate student in Santa Cruz, California. His book, Combined and Uneven Apocalypse, will be published by Zero Books in fall 2010. His blog is http://socialismandorbarbarism.blogspot.com

Footnotes

1 For a complete time-line (up until the end of December), go to the online version of the After the Fall: Communiqués from Occupied California, pp.18 and 19 of the PDF, http://afterthefallcommuniques.info/?p=77

2 A clarification about these thoughts: unlike the majority of the texts and statements from the past six months, this isn’t anonymous or from an autonomous collective. It doesn’t aim to represent the movement as a whole, or even the ‘ultra-left’ current of it. (Neither have the other writings emerging from collectives and committees, groups of friends and strangers brought together: to claim that they misrepresent others involved is to miss the point that they aren’t interested in speaking for a ‘movement’, only for a passing moment and an attempt to situate it in its passage.) That said, the thoughts that follow are not ‘my own’. They are inflected, to be sure, by my tendencies, but I have no proprietary relationship to them: if anything, they are a brief, incomplete crystallisation of countless conversations had and overheard, arguments made in private and printed en masse and, above all, instances of acting.

3 I strongly suggest two documents that do so more ably: Will Parrish and Darwin Bond-Graham’s ‘Who Runs the University of California?’, on the financial structures at work in the UC system, and the newspaper, After the Fall: Communiqués from Occupied California, which includes key occupation texts from the fall plus new writing that both recounts and covers new ground in elaborating the ‘ultra-left’ perspective.

4 This essay will be followed by a second part in which I consider in greater detail the specific tactics, trends, and theories that have emerged over the past six months. Available on Socialism and/or Barbarism: http://socialismandorbarbarism.blogspot.com/2010/03/painting-glass-house-black-part-two.html

5 See Parrish and Bond-Graham for more on this, ‘Who Runs the University of California?’ at: http://www.counterpunch.org/parrish03012010.html

6 The public education system, we should add, of the state which itself constitutes the 8th largest economy in the world.

7 To take a few: the inability of workers to make a decent living wage, students working and borrowing more to pay back for an education with fewer and more crowded classes, whole departments going under, increased emphasis on aspects of the education sector able to bring in private research dollars, the infamous rise of precarity for graduate students and lecturers.

8 This led, in turn, to the occupation blog/set of writings under the impeccably named ‘Anti-Capital Projects’. For a detailed discussion of the financial instruments behind this use of tuition, see Bob Meister’s key text, ‘They Pledged Your Tuition’, available at: http://www.cucfa.org/news/2009_oct11.php

9 Again, one need not be a historical materialist to see something very wrong, and justifiably rage-inducing in such a laid-bare state of affairs.

10 I draw the ‘glass floor’ metaphor from Théorie Communiste’s writings on the Greek riots. Available in English at:

http://www.riff-raff.se/wiki/en/theorie_communiste/the_glass_floor

11 A longer issue, taken up in part two of this essay, is how to relate this figure of the glass house to older legacies of revolutionary movements. Walter Benjamin, commenting on Breton, wrote that ‘to live in a glass house is a revolutionary virtue par excellence’: in that sense, it was a triumph of publicness and shamelessness over bourgeois notions of the domestic and private. Yet the contemporary tendency toward a language of the invisible and of the opaque signals not just a rhetorical preference but also a registration of a profoundly different political-economic situation.

12 For example, one could surely prove, with hard data, that the phrase ‘human strike’ is uttered with far more frequency than six months ago.

13 Relevant, in part, as other instances of attempts to think about an ‘anti-politics’ fundamentally opposed to representational governance and also aware of the limits of more traditional articulations (parties, unions) of worker power, particularly in the contemporary moment.

14 As a friend put it pithily in an off-hand comment, Communiqué from an Absent Driver.


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Communiqués

PUBLIC MEETING: GOLDSMITHS FIGHTS BACK

PUBLIC MEETING: GOLDSMITHS FIGHTS BACK
The Stretch, Goldsmiths Student Union, UK
Thursday, January 20 · 6:00pm – 8:00pm

The Government’s destruction of education continues in the face of massive opposition from students. Meanwhile the management of Goldsmiths and other universities across Britain remain completely obedient to the ConDem programme and continue to ignore our demands.

Goldsmiths students and staff have already protested and occupied in opposition to the management and government’s attack on education. We intend to continue the struggle, and we are calling this meeting to bring people together to discuss the next step in the fightback at Goldsmiths.

Please come down and join us for an open discussion about the current situation. All students, academic and support staff, local anti-cuts groups, and supporters are invited to exchange ideas and work together to coordinate further action.

Everyone’s ideas and input are welcome, and we hope that this meeting will help us to both regroup and expand.

Who we are:

Goldsmiths Fights Back is formed out of those involved in recent occupations and is open to anyone who wants to resist the imposition of fees and cuts at Goldsmiths and beyond.

What unites us:

We are a group that has come together in opposition to the cuts, in education and across the public sector.

Education is a right for all!

We act in solidarity with all those affected and all groups organising in resistance against these ideologically-motivated attacks on the whole of society.

What we aim to do:

Take action to oppose and resist the Government that is orchestrating these cuts, and the institutions that are attempting to impose them.

Raise engagement with the issue of the cuts and their impacts, amongst Goldsmiths students and the wider community.

Build a network with other university occupations, schools and sixth forms, workers and communities.

Imagine and demonstrate a new educational paradigm, and a society that is equitable, just and creative.

Venue details: The Stretch, Student Union, Goldsmiths College, 8 Lewisham Way, London SE14 6NW.

For more information contact: info@goldsmithsfightsback.org.uk

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Communiqués

Brown Cuts UC Budget by 500 Million

From Jerry Brown’s Website:

Governor Jerry Brown will release a balanced state budget today that slashes spending by $12.5 billion, including an eight to 10 percent cut in take-home pay for most state employees, and proposes a “vast and historic” restructuring of government operations…

Major spending reductions include $1.7 billion to Medi-Cal, $1.5 billion to California’s welfare-to-work program (CalWORKs), $750 million to the Department of Developmental Services, $500 million to the University of California, $500 million to California State University, and $308 million for a 10 percent reduction in take-home pay for state employees not currently covered under collective bargaining agreements. Brown also plans to trim state government operations by $200 million through a variety of actions, including reorganizations, consolidations and other efficiencies.

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Communiqués

Spring 2011 Statement: Lines of Demarcation

At reclaimuc.blogspot.com:

From Lines of Demarcation [PDF here]:

Many of us are looking back right now at the sets of actions that trace student/worker/faculty opposition to the programmatic final neoliberalizing of the university. We have engaged in various actions over the course of the last two years, some of which we have seen the immediate effects of and some whose effects we have not been able to see or anticipate. Those actions in the second group are the source of much anxiety; we wonder if they have been a waste since they appear not to have advanced anything. We should remember that actions have a dispersed life and bear on our moment in many ways. One way that we can understand this is by the effects that we can see in the actions of our enemies. The administration is shaken. This is evident by the unprecedented police presence on our campuses after the Regents’ meeting. They are trying to forcibly enter our meetings, scare us with heavy handed legal consequences. Collectively, we are students, faculty, student-workers, and service workers, we are the classes that make the university, we provide the labor that it uses as capital and cache in its attempt to sell the university as a commodity. They hold us in precarious positions and divide us from one another through bureaucratic distinctions like job titles and degree designations. They pit us against each other, making us think that we have to fight each other for resources. This is a lie. They know that we produce, collectively, the product that they sell and profit from. They keep our wages down and our ability to determine the university by keeping us from aligning with one another. We have learned in the history of our actions that we are already aligned. When we act together, as we have, they cannot stop us. The problem emerges when we are again divided by our fear: fear of sanctions, fear of violence, fear of future retribution. We must not let this be the case. We must remain in solidarity.

It may be easy to feel depressed about the lack of apparent wins, but our actions have had consequences. Now is the time to push those consequences to the conclusions that we want. Let’s not let the round of repression from the university, the police, and their allies keep us from reconfiguring the spaces that we live and work in. We are angry at the wave of arrests, home ‘visits’, police standing guard on our campuses, sending students to jail, and charging them with ‘serious’ crimes.

The convention of looking backward as one begins something new only reveals what is normally concealed; the past can only exist in the present. We look to the past to get a sense of what to do in the present, but the present is opaque to us too. The present is the name that we give to what has just happened. To be concerned with the present in this way is to think ideologically about what is possible. We can and must thinkwith the conjuncture, not about it. The present that we occupy is under construction at every moment in the sense that we produce the narratives of our actions that give them meaning. We live here. We live now. We act in the relations that we live in if we do this, we move against ideological separation and we move in solidarity. This is to say: they are afraid; if we were not threatening, they would not push back with this force; however, their fear alone isn’t a win and it doesn’t mean that they can’t hurt us. Let’s push the situation further. We should begin to disrupt every aspect of business as usual. Engage in every tactic that brings the university to a halt. Solidarity means that we act in concert but not in unification. We should have one demand: the control of the place that we both produce and are produced by. We must do everything we can to disrupt every process that forces us to produce our own debt and hold us accountable for it. Shut down the processes that are mobilized to keep students and workers from controlling the university. Let’s realize the relations that capital tries to conceal from us. Categories of hierarchy (graduate students, lecturers, adjuncts, undergraduates, faculty, staff, service workers) though material, conceal the ways in which we are all precariously situated in the institution that we make.

WE WANT EVERYTHING * WE WILL NOT COMPROMISE WITH ADMINISTRATORS OR POLICE * DISRUPT * OCCUPY * STRIKE * TAKE OVER * SHUT DOWN * BARRICADE EVERYTHING // OCCUPY EVERYTHING




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Communiqués

RED. in the red. speculative lending, student debt and stellar bond ratings in the UC

http://www.sfbg.com/2011/01/11/red?page=0%2C0

robert meister : http://keepcaliforniaspromise.org/wp-content/uploads/2009/10/UC-on-Wall-Street-summary.pdf

bob samuels: http://berkeleycuts.org/wp-content/uploads/2009/09/Links-for-Budget-Crisis-Informational-Flyer.pdf

When the University of California Board of Regents met Nov. 17, 2010 to approve an 8 percent tuition hike, roughly 300 UC students who were furious about the decision converged outside the University of California, San Francisco (UCSF) campus at Mission Bay to rally in opposition, some traveling from as far away as Los Angeles.

“We had been organizing with all the campuses to get students to come up because we really wanted to be there to let them know that it’s not what we want, and it’s something they can’t just get away with doing year after year,” said UC Student Association President Claudia Magana. The protests were raucous, and police cracked down by discharging pepper spray and making 13 arrests.

Despite the palpable fury outside and impassioned student opposition delivered to the Regents inside, the 8 percent fee increase was approved. It came on the heels of a 32 percent tuition increase imposed the year before, and the price was ratcheted up by 9 percent and 7 percent in the years prior to that.

The tuition hikes were steep, but hardly new. Indeed, the cost of attending UC schools has been rising steadily for quite a while. According to a study by economist Peter Donohue, student tuition and fees increased 277 percent from 1990-91 to 2008-09, and that was prior to the 40 percent increase that followed. That trend is repeated in rising costs at the California State University and California Community College systems (See “Access Denied,” April 6, 2010).

Student protesters have sought to make it clear that their outrage isn’t rooted in selfish unwillingness to shell out more money, but instead is linked to a broader concern about privatization and the increasingly limited accessibility of public education.

Magana expressed concern that the climbing cost of instruction at UC, though still a relative bargain compared with private institutions, would ultimately start to affect who could and couldn’t attain higher education through the public university system. The question isn’t limited to UC — tuition is increasing at public and private colleges across the board, and as income inequality sharpens, more students seek higher education.

“Students will always pay to be here,” she noted. “The issue is going to be, which students are here? That’s really the big problem — the huge class issue that’s going to come up. Although there are some forms of support for low-income students, it’s not easy.”


DEEPER IN DEBT

Rising costs at UC mirror the upward trend at private nonprofit and for-profit postsecondary institutions nationwide, and those higher prices have triggered a dramatic increase in student borrowing. While students from low- or medium-income families can access higher education at any institution they’re admitted to as long as they’re willing to take out significant sums in student loans, many find themselves at a serious disadvantage once they have to start repaying their debt.

A study conducted by the Public Interest Research Group (PIRG) noted that hefty debt burdens often dissuade graduates from pursuing careers in teaching, social work, the nonprofit sector, or other low-paying occupations that foster social justice. PIRG found that 23 percent of public four-year college grads and 38 percent of private four-year college grads were saddled with too much debt to manage paying back student loans on a starting teacher’s salary.

For students pursuing careers as social workers, the economic bind looked even worse: 37 percent of public school grads and 55 percent of private school grads with student loans wouldn’t be able to manage repayment with starting salaries in that field, the study concluded.

“Because students with lower incomes are more dependent on student loans than higher income students, students who already face significant challenges to attending college will more strongly feel the effect of loan debt on career choice,” the report points out.

“It’s a serious problem for so many young people to be starting out their working life so deep in debt,” said Edie Irons, spokesperson for The Institute on College Access and Success (TICAS), an Oakland-based research organization. “It really does limit people’s ability to take advantage of the opportunities education is supposed to provide. In concrete terms, it can make it really hard to buy a house, or start a business, or start a family, or go back to grad school, or to save for retirement or your own children’s education. And that’s all assuming you can keep up with the payments.”

Student loan debt has intensified over the past two decades. In 1993, just one third of all four-year college students graduated with debt, owing on average slightly more than $9,000, according to PIRG.

Today, the majority of college students take out loans to finance their education. Around 62 percent of public university students graduate with student loans, as do 72 percent of students attending private nonprofit institutions, and 96 percent of students attending for-profit institutions such as the University of Phoenix or the Academy of Art University, according to TICAS. Nationally, students graduate owing an average of $24,000, not counting debt associated with advanced degrees.

While young people must invest more than ever before to obtain higher education, the return on investment isn’t showing signs of improvement. The expected median income for UC graduates has stayed the same over the last decade, even as the cost of tuition has ballooned.

What’s more, says Bob Meister, president of the Council of UC Faculty Associations and professor of Political and Social Thought at UC Santa Cruz, is that an estimated 40 percent of public university students entering the workforce will either be unable to find a job, or will land in a lower-paying job that doesn’t require a college degree.

“For college graduates under 25, the unemployment rate is nearly as high as the national unemployment rate,” around 10 percent, Meister notes. “Over the past decade, what’s happened is that the median hasn’t risen. The top has risen very fast, and the bottom has fallen.”


IN A DIFFERENT CLASS

There’s no doubt that diminished state funding is affecting California’s public universities.

“A lot of departments are being eliminated, and a lot of professors who are really amazing are leaving to other universities,” Magana says. “And the waiting lists for classes are just ridiculous.” Academic goals are being compromised — for example, students had to abandon their push for an ethnic studies program at UCSC, she added, because the American studies department that would have partially supported it was slashed.

While diminished public funding has been used to explain the need to raise tuition, Meister has published numerous essays suggesting that the root cause of rising tuition costs at UC goes deeper than that, and he has gone so far as to publicly encourage students not to accept higher tuition without first demanding financial information.

Meister previously served on the UC budget committee and has observed the institution’s evolving financial policies for years. He doesn’t seem surprised that tuition is going up, regardless of what condition the economy is in or what amount of public funding is available because, as he puts it, “the universities will cost as much as they can.” UC had long sought to boost revenue by raising tuition, he noted, yet its leaders feared a rollback in state funding in response. But that changed under Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger, who agreed to increase state support only on condition of that UC in turn require students to contribute more.

Around the same time that Schwarzenegger provided this new incentive to raise tuition, UC pooled its various revenue streams into a consolidated general revenue fund, Meister said, a departure from the old way of keeping separate accounts. This new fund, which included all non-state revenue and funding that wasn’t legally required to be used for certain purposes, could be pledged entirely as collateral for bonds for new construction projects, greatly increasing the institution’s borrowing power and boosting its revenue with the addition of new facilities.

To maintain its stellar bond rating, UC had to ensure an increase in revenues, according to Meister’s explanation, and to do that, UC ratcheted up the one source of revenue it had full control over: tuition. Meister laid bare this financial play in a 2009 open letter to students, titled “They Pledged Your Tuition.” Since it was published, a small corps of student activists has become deeply engaged in studying campus finance documents and airing criticism of financial policies.

Just before the Nov. 17 protests at UCSF Mission Bay, Meister published another open letter, this one addressed to UC President Mark Yudof. This one contemplated, “Why they think they can increase revenues regardless of how fast the economy grows … and regardless of whether the income of graduates is stagnant.”

His answer is somewhat surprising: “Their ability to raise tuition is a function of the growth of income inequality,” he told the Guardian. In the letter, Meister charges, “In the 21st century, when almost all income growth has been in the top 1 to 2 percent of California’s population, UC is still marketing income inequality to students as its most important product. It now expects all students to pay more for an ever-shrinking chance of reaping the ever-growing rewards that our economy makes available to the few. Your plan to increase revenue through tuition growth is feasible, of course, only because the federal government still allows students to borrow more for education despite the greater likelihood that they will not be able to repay — student loans may be the last form of subprime credit available in our economy.” Meister Report: http://keepcaliforniaspromise.org/wp-content/uploads/2009/10/UC-on-Wall-Street-summary.pdf

His theory highlights a paradox. “Being in the have-not category is increasingly worse,” he explains, “and so they are willing to take on more debt, which actually dampens their prospects for income growth.”

The question now is what will happen under Gov. Jerry Brown, who is likely to take a different stance toward rising tuition than Schwarzenegger but nonetheless is expected to unveil harsh cuts to education as a way to address a $26 billion budget deficit.

In a recent interview with the San Francisco Chronicle, UC Regent Richard Blum indicated that it probably would not be feasible to raise tuition again, so the message was that students should brace for more cuts to education.