Categories
Communiqués

Capitalizing on the Revolution: Post-Revolutionary Knowledge Economies

Capitalizing on the Revolution: Post-Revolutionary Knowledge Economies by Angela Harutyunyan February 23, 2011

“Capitalizing on the Revolution” and “University on the Square”: American University in Cairo gives birth to post-revolutionary culture industries, whereas during the protests all it did was remain silent. A “Historic Moment” was announced only when there were credible rumors of Mubarak’s  departure from power.
 
As I stand in the square, as I walk in the tense streets of downtown Cairo, as I take the metro full of worn out faces emotionally charged, but silent, I am haunted by a specter, the specter of a post-revolutionary culture industry and knowledge economy. As the exhilarated cries and jubilation approach their climactic finale with the Vice President’s abrupt and laconic announcement of Mubarak’s departure, I start envisioning greedy hands reaching for the biggest cut of the revolutionary pie, high-pitched moralizing attitudes and high-brow self-righteousness. But worst of all, I see an entire post-revolutionary knowledge economy based on a self-serving and pragmatic appropriation of the position of the moralizing hero- be those institutional or individual positions. 
 
 
In the specific modes of production and consumption of knowledge that follow certain economic patterns, and more concretely, the patterns of globalized circulation of goods, products, signs and images, a direct revolutionary action is both neutralized and multiplied. It is being recapped in the realm of representation, documentation, historiographical undertakings and post-revolutionary educational tourism. Moreover, the reclamation of the revolution by an institution that has done nothing but cooperate with the same corrupt regime they now feverishly discard, remained conspicuously silent throughout the uprising and merely bothered with the safety and entertainment of students and faculty, seeks to reassert its legitimizing function in the constellations of the post-Mubarak, post-Ben Ali and hopefully post-dictatorial Arab world.  But this legitimization does not remain merely at the level of cultural recognition and scholarship. It has its economy and politics as it strives to institutionalize and market the body of revolutionary knowledge and experience to be collected, reproduced and ultimately consumed.  
 
As AUC announces a new program “The University on the Square: Documenting History in Real Time”, an educational initiative to “Capitalize on Egypt’s Historic Developments”,  it attempts to erase the memory of its own complicit silence…
 
On February 17th I received an email from the Foundation for Arts Initiative informing me of an approved offer for a large sum research grant I never applied for, to “explore your own thoughts about contemporary cultural practice in Egypt’s transformed environment.”
 
I am wondering why I need funding to explore my thoughts…
 
Is this the same economy of knowledge AUC is trying to catch up with? How to deal with so much economic and ideological instrumentalization that is already traceable even before the revolution has crystalised as an event?

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Features

Masks, or The Illusion of Power

The following text is a script for a participatory performance. Copies of the text are handed out to the audience and volunteers are asked to read aloud the questions that are underlined along with the performer. The script was first performed at the UCIRA conference State of the Arts at UCSD on 11/20/2010.

Our schools are, in a sense, factories in which the raw materials are to be shaped and fashioned into products to meet the various demands of life. The specifications for manufacturing come from the demands of twentieth century civilization, and it is the business of the school to build its pupils to the specifications laid down. –Ellwood Cubberly, Public School Administration, 1916 quoted in School is a Factory by Allan Sekula, 1980.

The students’ movement in California and around the US is a real opening for radical politics. It raises basic questions about what society has become and where it is going. I am a long-term critic of neoliberalism, I am convinced that this form of capitalism is totally unsustainable and unlivable. Since, however, it is squarely installed in the realms of knowledge, culture and information — since it is cognitive capitalism — it seems there is no more strategic point for opposition than the universities. That doesn’t mean that every point of opposition is not important, just that this one could become crucial if enough people would raise the basic questions of value, what’s society good for, how am I participating, which consequences does that have on others, etc. Those kinds of questions form the basis of the practical philosophy that interests me. –Brian Holmes in an interview by Michael Wilson  (http://occupyeverything.com/features/interview-with-brian-holmes-steps-toward-a-cultural-strategy/)

“a) The struggle for public education is a struggle against privatization throughout the economy, against the exclusions of the marketplace, and finally against an economy based on private resources.

b) The defense of staff and adjunct teachers is part of a program against the precaritization of workers’ lives in every sector.

c) The student (witness the recent revelations about the scope of student debt) is not a privileged case but a true subject of the market in its credit-fueled plunderings of the future — and the fight against capitalism will necessarily happen on campuses, among other places.via facebook by Joshua Clover

“A school is a factory is a poem is a prison is academia is boredom, with flashes of panic.” -Joseph Brodsky


Thanks everyone for coming and thanks to the organizers of the conference. I would like to dedicate my time today to reflecting on my engagement – both individually and collectively – with the struggles around the meaning of public education over the past year and in doing so I hope to consider what I see as an unresolved tensions within this struggle that are both productive and debilitating. And those are, in part, the tensions around symbolic action and modes of engagement – The tensions that surround the meaning of public education when what constitutes ‘the public’ is itself a contested term full of the sorts of antagonisms that animate collective fictions. By focusing on the arc of my own involvement in this struggle I hope not to engage in a kind of narcissistic blow by blow of the last year or so but rather to re-examine my experiences in light of questions that faced and still face those of us who seek to link the struggles around public education with a broad social, political and economic climate and the ways that the university administration manages various forms of resistance to privatization.

I warn you in advance that some listeners may find a certain naivete and redundancy in what follows but what I would like to say, without a hint of anti-intellectualism, is that I’m looking to avoid further mystification without oversimplifying the complexity of our predicament. I should also say by way of introduction something about my format. When I proposed this talk for the conference I was under investigation by Labor relations at UCR for my involvement with the website which announced Mark Yudof’s resignation last March. I’ve structured this presentation in an intentionally open ended way so that we might have a conversation and really use the experiences and questions that I present as a starting point. I don’t want to preach to the choir here and I do think that we have to ask difficult questions of ourselves so that as the administration puts the final touches on dismantling the UC system as we know it, this conference does not become hamstrung by hand wringing OR by patting ourselves on the back. The question is not only WHAT TO DO NOW but also how do we move from protest to action, from managed, reactionary politics towards spaces of potential?

On september 24th last year, after making a number of protest signs and teaching an abridged version of my web-based art class at UCR, I encouraged my class to attend the rally together which was beginning to form just outside of the art building. I had already spent a large portion of the class explaining the so-called crisis as I understood it then, the logic of the walk-out and I made what I thought was a rational appeal to my students: namely that the interests of staff, faculty and students were being undermined in the name of austerity and efficiency. This logic, I explained, could only be countered by a large demonstration of refusal. Most of my students wandered off sheepishly and the rally, though organized with good intentions and a sense of commitment, was poorly attended and felt more like a rehearsal than an event. Meanwhile other campuses saw rallies attended by thousands and the building occupations that have given this “struggle” such as it is, its real meaning and charge. One of the questions I faced was how to activate meaningful struggle on a campus that seemed and still seems almost oblivious to the gravity of the present-day dynamics of the university.

Between that September day and the regents meeting at UCLA in November was a crucial germination period in terms of my own thinking about what the stakes of this particular struggle represent. A teach-in in Berkeley – still available on youtube – set out very clearly that in fact everything was and is at stake. Wendy Brown, the renowned political scientist, suggested the legacy of prop 13 and 30 years of right wing propaganda have ushered in a political moment in which we risk absolutely every aspect of human experience being reduced to equations of dollars and cents. And I probably don’t need to tell all of you that we are fighting, to put it very bluntly, to stop the utter commodification of absolutely everything. The 50,000 students marching in London last week and the relatively timid actions in CA this week, are loud reminders that this is only the beginning of that struggle…

The day of the November regents meeting at UCLA last year was perhaps the decisive moment in my understanding of this struggle… I recall vividly walking between a large confrontational protest in front of the building where the regents were approving the 32% fee hike with students linking arms defiantly in front of cops in full riot gear. The scene was tense and vital but also predictable. Both the cops and those of us protesting had rehearsed our roles many time before… if not literally then in some cinematic, phantasmagorically inflected dream. On the other side of campus, students had occupied a building, issued a beautifully open statement, and renamed the building after two murdered black panthers bunchy carter and John Huggins. The space around the building was mysteriously quiet. I tried to enter but was not allowed in… I stood outside in solidarity and argued with the odd passerby who was willing to engage with me about the merits of the occupation. Towards the end of the day I drove home in the blank and contorted traffic of Los Angeles. Los Angeles, the place that Jason Brown describes as “a hellscape of ash and banality, a metastasizing agglomeration of darkness and pain, a fungal architecture engulfing the earth in erasures and hyperrealities…” So… when our actions become too rehearsed, we search for ways to re-animate our own sense of what constitutes collective, direct action. We try to shake off the distracted paralysis and the tormented mask. We look for ways to inject into our cynical narratives moments of off kilter gestures, we try to most of all to surprise ourselves. But on that November day I wrote: “Some say the economy is shattered. I say the economy shatters us all. At least for today. Today is an economy of shatters. Or, shattering, today is an economy of alternative economies.”

It was a desire to overcome the stale habits of protest, retaining of course a spark of that oppositional spirit, that led me to think about strategic ways to push the meaning of the struggle elsewhere… or everywhere. Conversations and communication with Marc Herbst, Cara Baldwin, Jason Smith, Caleb Waldorf, Sean Dockray, Micha Cardenas, Michael Wilson, Brett Stalbaum and Ricardo Dominguez gave me the impetus and the inspiration to buy the domain name markyufof.com and begin thinking “what to do?” How best to use this site and when? How best intervene in and interfere with the impoverished symbolic logic and economy of the university? How best to target those who turn a crisis of priorities into a budget crisis? How to extend the logic and spirit of the building occupations? How to “occupy everything?” as we decided to put it…
The thing that surprised me most on the morning of March 3, when yudof’s resignation site was made public was the speed with which events unfolded. Threads began to circulate on discussion boards:

– this is a gag, right. probably would be a good idea to hold the jokes for a while. too many jokers around who don’t know when something is not funny.(ucsd)

– This is funny. “I have decided to go back to school to study the history of social movements.” as if…

–Is this a joke? I feel like I am in the Twilight Zone? Is it April 1st?

– Read it more closely…. and see links to “occupy everything ” , “destroy capitalism ” and the like……??Well done, authors! You had me going

– If ONLY it was true. And in this hyper-reality, who knows, who knows?

And it was only a couple of hours before I received an e-mail from the office of strategic communications at UCR, cc’d to the chair of the art department Charles Long:


Hi to both,
We have a problem. A Web site pretending to say that Yudof has resigned can
be traced back to Ken Ehrlich and the UC art department.

Anything we can do about getting that down?

We have one media request already and we are likely to see more….

Thanks, Kris

Kris Lovekin
Director of Media Relations
Office of Strategic Communications

The question of anonymity, or the potential for certain forms of digital masking, quickly came to the foreground. When I purchased the domain name, I chose not make the domain information private. This was a quick decision, not without consideration, but also not entirely cognizant of the ramifications of this choice. Even though the site was hosted through the BANGLAB server here at UCSD with the support and encouragement of Ricardo and Micha and Brett, a quick web search revealed me as the owner of the domain. As the gesture played out in the media, I was trying to strike a delicate balance: I did not want to claim sole credit for the project in a way that would take away from the idea of using yudof’s “power’ in the media and directing it towards the actions in support of public education scheduled for March 4. I also felt that the longer the gesture played ambiguously in the media, the more attention it would generate. In an effort to strike the right balance, when media relations asked me “if there was anything I could do about getting it down” I changed the domain registration to private and wrote back, saying that the site should no longer be connected to me or UCR. Later when the investigation was underway, and I went public asking for support and citing Ricardo’s idea of radical transparency, this caused some confusion. The fact is that I never explicitly denied my involvement, I simply attempted to mask it slightly in an attempt to give the gesture more legs.

The local chapter of the AFT, the union that represents lecturers and librarians across the campuses, was completely supportive and immediately and assertively working with me to end the labor relations investigation as soon as it began. Letters of support poured in from around the country and all over the world. As amazing as the showing of support was, the question quickly became: How to use the energy and organizing around the investigations and turn it towards a continued activation of the struggle to re-imagine public education? The administration seemed to be using investigations as a means to suppress dissent. Was the goal of the investigation meant to have a chilling effect on protest as much as it was to persecute my individual actions? Certainly potentially losing my job was consequence I could not take lightly – and the criminal investigation that ricardo, micha, brett and bang lab were facing even more so – but the investigations became a distraction from many people using creative energy and time from organizing, agitating and articulating ways forward in the face of a bureaucratic and managerial structure whose main purpose it seems is to reinforce the narrow logic of administration and by extension, capital accumulation for the few and massive debt for the many. In this way, the investigations themselves became mired in the machinations of endless memos, meetings, conference calls and corporate communications. There might be an argument to be made that if the university were so bogged down by endless investigations into similar activities, the bureaucratic structure might fall in on itself in some sort of Kafkaesque joke, but as we’ve seen, so far the university has proven remarkably fluent at maintaining high levels of managerial gravitas and public relations flim flam.

After one tense meeting and months of waiting, anticipation and silence from the administration, I finally in July received a counseling memo. I definitely need counseling of all sorts, but I couldn’t help wonder about the semiotic implications of declaring me the counseled one. I suppose it’s better than rehabilitated. The memo encouraged me, in the course of my research, to be careful to abide by University policy and cited two specific violations of that policy. One was impersonating a university official. Clearly satire is not impersonation. Second, I improperly used the seal of the university. The authenticating image that ironically enough reads “let there be light” is of course meant to be used after receiving proper approval and signifies the real in the domain of the University.

One of the most successful aspects of the gesture, admittedly quite limited in scope given the dynamics at hand, was that it forced the members of my department to have a series of difficult conversations about the website and ultimately come out in public either in support of me and the work (as most chose to do) or implicitly identify themselves as complicit with the corporate logic of the University. With some notable exceptions, in the last year faculty across the campuses have been remarkably complacent and uncreative in responding to this series of assaults on public education that have now resulted in a 40% fee hike, furloughs, layoffs, etc.. The question is why? Have faculty members either fully internalized the corporate logic of the university or do they imagine that they can hold onto whatever position thru this storm without causing a fuss? What else goes on in the minds of faculty members who are disengaged and silent?? Do faculty and students perceive engagement in the terrain of education as just another demand? Be more rigorous, more political, more engaged, funnier, more media savvy, more politically adroit, more sensitive to race, gender and sexuality. Since rebellion is packaged and re-packaged as a refusal to submit to demands, whether they are familial, cultural or political, do faculty and students imagine disengagement itself as a form of protest? Part of what I wanted to say with the website, either symbolically or otherwise, was that Yudof does not have power unless we reaffirm it. The mask he wears is one that we help sustain…. I had little faith that yudof or the regents or the stunted bureaucracy of the administration would respond favorably to protest… But masks are ambiguous. Unmasking power does not reveal some formerly unseen truth, it reveals hidden or partially eclipsed potential. Students and faculty absolutely have the potential to structure the terms of the battle and, again with a few exceptions, we have failed to do so… How then, playfully, absurdly or otherwise, to transform masks of power?

Now I would like to step back to ask a series of questions specifically in relation to the arts. Given that traditionally and historically images have always had a charged relationship to truth claims, how can we possibly frame or understand critical image making in relation to the utterly fragmented and spectacular information overload that is endemic to cognitive or cultural capitalism? As the cops and students compete to analyze video and photographs of tense standoffs are we once again, as artists, caught up in debates about the relativism of meaning in relation to images? Does the political landscape of the university itself become a series of abstract images?

An artist whose own work is instructive in thinking through these problems is Allan Sekula. In particular his 1978 project School is a Factory points out some of the historical remnants of critical image making in relation to the politics of education. As a scholar of photography and an image maker, Sekula uses sophisticated prose to situate and problemitize his own photographs, relying on language to lift images out of the abstract and ambiguous space in which they circulate culturally.

Part of Sekula’s strategy in school is a factory is polemic, perhaps one that underestimates the complexities and nuances of power, for strategic ends. And here I will quote Sekula at length:

We have been led by the champions of corporate liberalism to believe that schooling and the media are instruments of freedom. Accordingly, these institutions are seen to fulfill the democratic promise of the enlightenment by bringing knowledge and upward social mobility within reach of everyone, by allowing each individual to reach his or her own limits. This ideology hides the relentless sorting function performed by school and the media. Both institutions serve to legitimate and reproduce a strict hierarchy of power relations, tracking individuals into places in a complex social division of labor while suggesting that we have only ourselves to blame for our failures. School and the media effectively situate most people in a culture and economy over which they have no control, and thus are mechanisms by which an “enlightened” few promote the subtle silencing of the many.


School and the media are inherently discursive institutions, sites within which discourse becomes a locus of symbolic force, of symbolic violence. A communicative relation is established between teacher and student, performer and audience, in which the first part, as the purveyor of official “truths,” exerts an institutional authority over the second. Students and audience are reduced the status of passive listeners, rather than active subjects of knowledge. Resistance is almost always limited only to the possibility of tuning out. Domination depends on a monologue of sorts, a “conversation” in which one party names and directs the other, while the the other listens deferentially, docilely, resentfully, perhaps full of suppressed rage. When the wholly dominated listener turns to speak, it is with the internalized voice of the master. This is the dynamic of of all oppressions of race, gender and class. All dominating power functions semiotically through the naming of the other as subordinate, dependent, incomplete as a human being without the master’s discipline and support. Clearly such relationships can be overthrown; the discourse of domination finds its dialectical antagonist in a discourse and practice of liberation. Like home, factory, prison and city streets, school and the media are sites of an intense, if often covert, daily struggle in which language and power are inextricably connected.

Sekula’s positioning of education as central to “the sorting function” under capitalism echoes the current demand that we understand the fight for public education in the broadest possible context. Do we defend public education in its current problematic form or do we see the organizing around public education as an opening for an other kind of politics? Certainly we can also draw on Sekula’s strategy here to produce an engaged critique. The work in question was made while Sekula was teaching at a southern CA community college and part of its success and long term meaning is based on his own self implication: For Sekula this is not a detached analysis, but a provocation. A set of questions about institutions from within.

In context, this kind of politically minded artistic work constitutes a move from representation to engagement. While many readings of most so called political art might justifiably render an artwork a simple illustration of nuanced political questions, Sekula’s work demonstrates the potential to imagine forms of artistic engagement that oscillate across aesthetic, subjective and social spheres. Sekula’s practice circulates around the documentary form; while the gesture of a satirical website that plays with the conventions of authenticity is situated in the domain of hyperreality (or whatever other awful term we’ve come up with to describe the contemporary digital landscape). Sekula’s work and this gesture, as different as they might be, both traffic in forms of text and image making in which verifiability and abstraction are central. At the end of the essay that accompanies these images, it is precisely forms of abstraction that Sekula critiques.

There is first the abstraction inherent in what he calls the “supposedly realistic world picture of a bureaucratic, commodity centered society: the abstraction that emerges from the triumph of exchange value over use value, and so on.” And secondly, the abstraction that emerges from the separation of aesthetic culture from the rest of life, the imagined freedom of the disengaged play of signifiers. Against these forms of abstraction, Sekula argues for a kind of political geography. What does this political geography look like? Analyzing the interrelated dynamics of intellectual labor, cultural capital, the rise of a managerial class inextricably linked to the politics of education, Sekula’s designation of political geography is a prescient identification of the territory we currently inhabit. Produced at around the time of prop 13 and before the Reagan era set in, the work stands as both a critique of and a warning against the surge of cognitive capitalism witnessed since the time of it’s production. If Sekula seeks to move from representation to engagement through contextualizing his photographs with text, there are certainly other and perhaps more complex ways to consider engagement. So too must there be other ways of engaging the political geography of the university than creating a satirical website announcing the resignation of a corporate bureaucrat. Far from an exemplary example of a nuanced engagement with the political geography of the University, the yudof website represents an experiment: an attempt to find a form for that kind of engagement.

Directly connected to my teaching digital media the gesture was created at a time when many in the university are re-considering pedagogical strategies. If we are to fundamentally engage the political geography of this place – where we teach, study, learn, socialize, do research, and so many other things – we might begin by asking What constitutes our own assumptions about pedagogy? And how might we continue to integrate experiments in pedagogy into our efforts to dismantle the logic and the structure of a university that does not prioritize education in the broadest sense of the word.

2010 ken@kenehrlich.net

Categories
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.

Categories
Communiqués

FBI asks about Dakota activist’s controversial speech

Waziyatawin, a professor of indigenous history at the University of Victoria in British Columbia who used to go by the name Angela Cavender Wilson, told students that it’s time for American Indians to abandon symbolic demonstrations. Truth-telling efforts haven’t achieved anything, she said, according to a recording of the speech obtained by the Winona Post. http://minnesota.publicradio.org/display/web/2011/01/07/indian-activist-fbi/

Cara Baldwin This is really an important case in point -not only  in relation to contemporary debates about the proper extent of  free speech – but to the notions of occupation and commons – with threads that relate to epic land-disputes elsewhere.

Chris Chen My sense is that scholars and activists who are part of these struggles are coming up against the limits of the various dominant anti-racist strategies in play for decades now: spiritual witnessing, consciousness raising, pleas for the recognition or tolerance of cultural difference, “speaking truth to power as though power didn’t know what it was doing,” etc.

These strategies presuppose that racist material dispossession and pervasive violence, an entire infrastructural political economy of racism, can somehow be remedied by symbolic rituals of inclusion and greater cultural appreciation (if liberal multicultural curricula at schools are any indication–this has been largely confined to dance, dress, and cuisine). I think that this culturalization of anti-racist thought and practice has been a disaster, projecting political agency outward, away from these communities.

Waziyatawin’s speech seems like a fairly modest proposal to reconsider more militant forms of direct action. In a post-911 US, I guess this means a visit from the FBI.

I should clarify that by projecting political agency outward away from these communities I mean performing cultural identity and difference for a potentially sympathetic audience of white liberals. The possibility of militant political action initiated by communities of color has become unimaginable in liberal political discourse which understands racism as a failure of cultural understanding.

Not only does this assert a depoliticized and profoundly disciplinary concept of shared cultural identities, it aggressively severs racism from political economy, and conceals the extent to which austerity, xenophobic scapegoating, and racist violence are mutually reinforcing.

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Communiqués

The University and the Ruins of the Present

http://wearethecrisis.blogspot.com/

From Comrades at UCLA:
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Our $800 fee hike is the direct result of an unstable global financial system.

As of the Regent’s meeting vote on November 18th, UC tuition has gone up over $800. A year at UCLA, Berkeley, Santa Cruz, Davis and Irvine now costs over $11,000 when in 2000 it cost $3,429. That means if you make $10 an hour, you’ll have to work 80 more hours next year, or if you’re a Freshman, take out $2,400 more in debt before you graduate. The tremors of the economic crisis continues to spread, and our chances of getting a job we want with our degrees becomes more and more slim. This is our future…

How can we understand this tuition hike in the context of broader social conditions? We find ourselves in the midst of the greatest economic crisis since the Great Depression. 2008 was a shock to the economy as a whole and will no doubt render the world we lived in before unrecognizable. Overproduction of and speculation on real estate, the creation of unsustainable financial tools to be invested in, rising mortgage, credit card and student loan debt — all of these created a crisis in which banks couldn’t lend, people couldn’t pay their bills and abandoned their homes, and states and governments ran out of money to spend. In order to cope with the massive problems caused by the financial crisis, governments around the world have responded in two major ways: austerity measures and debt financing.

Austerity: the Dialectic of Too Much and Not Enough

A certain narrative frames tuition hikes as the result of problems with the university budget and the lack of money coming in from the State of California. At one level, the problem is not a lack of money, but a question of how it is prioritized. Billions of dollars flow through the UC system. This money gets directed away from raises for workers and undergraduate education and goes to executive bonuses, new police stations and expensive graduate student housing. Let’s also not forget that the State of California spends more money on prisons than education. Public spending in general has expanded over the neoliberal period, funding such endeavors as bailouts for the largest banks and war in the Middle East. The logic that would posit the budget cuts and fee hikes as the necessary results of the economic crisis are therefore false. The University has, from this perspective “too much.”

Yet at another level, we can see a long term-trend towards a defunding of the public sector by governments and the implementation of austerity measures. These measures involve cutting funding to social services, such as hospitals and libraries, public transportation, and of course, education in order to compensate for a lack of money coming in from elsewhere. What this means is that in order to deal with the problems caused by bankers, speculators and stock brokers – those who brought on the financial crisis – governments place the burden on students, forcing them to pay more for their education. The university seen from this perspective, will continue to have “not enough.”

Debt and its False Master

The other pole of austerity is debt financing, meaning the use of bonds and loans in order to pay for an economic system in ruins. This occurs at a national level – the US government deficit has expanded exponentially since the Clinton years – and at the level of the individual seen in the expansion of consumer debt.

Because of this economic crisis, we have seen how governments, even with austerity measures in place, still can’t afford to fund the public sector fully. Therefore, they prop it up artificially by selling bonds (to countries such as China, Japan or Germany). In other words, the public sector continues to rely on an increasing amount of debt and growing national budget deficits.

Furthermore, the lack of public spending that comes with austerity measures displaces the financial costs of an education onto students, and this often means increased personal debt – student loans, credit cards. In turn, student loan and credit card debt become complex financial instruments that investors speculate on, recreating the very dynamics that created the 2008 collapse in the first place.

The University as a Ruin to Come

How does the university function within this economic collapse? A university degree used to promise a middle class wage for those who could get in and graduate. Tuition could be seen as an investment in a secure future. Whereas once the university specialized workers for a growing economy, in the era of postfordism and the eclipse of full-time salaried jobs, the promise of a university degree is breaking down. The university prepares us for jobs that have vanished. The university becomes more and more about labor discipline, the need to create a subjectivity which internalizes the demand to be hirable, the self-fashioning of human capital. We learn to become adaptable workers, capable of entering into the changing needs of the system, people who see social life through the lens of adding all our experiences to a CV.

Against the Wall

While these disciplining forces are at work, we have seen a different type of trend within the university: the emergence of vibrant student struggles all over the world. Since 2008, there have been waves of student occupations and blockades against austerity measures and other key student issues. This November we have seen occupations at British universities against the tripling of student fees and the closure of high schools across France in support of the general strike against pension reform.

One might say that once the economy “recovers,” all will return to normal – fees go back down, and austerity measures be reversed. But what if, as thinkers such as Gopal Balakrishnan, David Harvey and Robert Brenner have argued, we have reached the limits of capital? Debt, austerity and the fluctuations of the economy show us that the kind of growth we have known since the end of World War II in America is no longer sustainable. It is the private sector itself that is now propped up by consumer and government debt: a permanent bubble economy, an unsustainable economics. What if this is not one more crisis to add to the ash heap of time, but the burning away of the ashes themselves?

The Situation is Excellent

Students have historically catalyzed and supported broader movements: in May 68 in France, in Mexico City in 2000 and in Greece in 2008. Student struggles are indicative of larger social and economic dynamics, bound to them and capable of transforming them.

One path to take is retrenchment – to pull of the cap over one’s eyes so as to not see the monster, walk dejectedly across the ruins This is no option. There are no easy answers for how to resist; we have no idea what to do, but we will do it. Reworking our struggle will be our education, the ruins will be our friend. Because of this, we say: “there is great disorder under heaven; the situation is excellent.”

http://wearethecrisis.blogspot.com/