Student struggles in the USA

Submitted by Daniel_Randall on 3 December, 2010 - 5:18 Author: Wes Strong
Students

Wes Strong is a member of Solidarity, a revolutionary socialist organisation in America. He spoke to us about student struggles in the USA.

In the debate around HE funding in Britain there's a lot of talk about “the American model”. People are aware that this means higher fees, but what else does it mean? How are universities funded, and how is student finance administered? What sort of fees do students have to pay, and who decides the level of fees?

The “American Model” they are referring to must mean the model of the corporate university. An overwhelming shift in public educaiton has been occurring for thirty years, going back to the birth of neoliberalism. A huge power shift has taken place where the private sector has an ever growing influence on public education. Public education at the university level has historically been state funded, a burden shared by both individual states and the federal government. Each different state raises internal funds differently, and the federal government has supplies federal funding as well. State law in every state except vermont forbids states from passing a budget that runs at a deficit, so they are reliant on federal intervention in tough economic times. Of course, states could change these laws, but have no desire to do so as the majority of them receive money from the private sector and subsequently serve private sector interests. The private sector has been using these methods to implement neoliberal economic reforms (free trade, reganomics, etc) since the mid to late 70s. Part of this is the dismantling/defunding of public institutions. Public education has been underfunded at the state and federal level for decades. Students, many now full, part time, or contingent workers as well, have been forced to cover the difference with increasing tuition and fees. At my alma mater, tution increased 50% from when I enrolled until I graduated (when taken cummulatively). This is commonplace throughout the country, and in some places increases are even higher – particularly where the defunding is more advanced. The disappearance of public funds has been subsidized by private interests who invest in certain programs or provide financing via grant programs. These companies often use this financing to create a wedge into the public institution and gain mor einfluence. So, for instance, at UCBerkeley, BP has financed and runs an entire lab committed to climate science that is completely secret. It is expected that part of the science being done there is to confuse climate science debate. In california, BP also had executives sit on the body that devised the state's climate educaiton program for the k-12 schools. At my school, United Technologies (Hamliton Sunstrand, Pratt and Whittney, Sikorsky Aircraft) is connected to a few programs and helps finance some of the science. This is an obvious conflict of interest, but as these programs and strategies continues, it becomes clear the goals of these private interests – to dismantle the public system, design education around their needs – creating a super specialized class of engineer, scientist, and financial workers while providing others with a minimal level education required to work low skill jobs. If you want to know more about who really influences university policy, just look at the administrator's connections to the private sector. A good example of this is present in the K-12 system in New Orleans. The Board of Education controls 4 schools, over 100 others are charter (privatley run), and thousands of students have dropped out or dont attend school at all.

Students often have several different fees to pay. Each university or system determines their own fees structure. This is often decided by a board of trustees (BoT). BoTs are becoming more composed of private sector actors, business owners, former CEOs, and the like. They dont fight for students or workers and promote the same neoliberal strategy carries by the larger private sector. When cuts come down they accept them as inevitable (like the well trained bureaucrats they are) and refuse to shake the cages of their bosses to fight for more funding. They then implement more “inevitable” cuts and fee hikes. This is essentially unanimous.

Student aid in the forms of grants and loans are legislated and regulated by the government. Recently, we have seen more grants and loans go to those attending private schools than those attending public schools – according to a source of mine in the AAUP (university professor union). You lose student aid if you are convicted of a misdemeanor drug charge (as simple as carrying a joint), and there are many other ways they try to make sure they don't pay out aid. There are also private loans, which are almost unanimously unsubsidized. This means interest accrues while you are at school. Many federal loans are subsidized and do not accrue interest.

Either way, student debt is WAY up over the past 20 years, and the roads out of debt are both paved with a decade of wage slavery. Though the government recently passed a law that erases student debt after 10 years, in order to not be forced to pay, ,you have to earn well below the poverty line. This is becoming more of a possibilty for many youth, especially as jobs continue to disappear and prospects are even slimmer (unless you want to go back for a higher degree and take on more debt). The future looks pretty bleak for youth, whether you go to college/university or not.

HE budgets were first in line for cuts as part of austerity measures in the aftermath of the financial crisis (even before the Tory-Lib Dem government was elected). How has the HE sector been effected by cuts in the US?

The federal govenrment has distributed some funding in an attempt to preserve higher education, but it is largely being sat on. Administrators have millions/billions in extra funds but are largely sitting on them because they are concerned about the future of the market. If it crashes again, they claim the want the safety net the money can provide, all while they are pulling out the saftey net from students and workers by not using the money. In the long run, the money will likely disappear, and the cuts will escalate. But the money to pay the salsries of the top administrators – some of them making millions – will be there, undoubtedly.

In terms of affects, many public institutions have frozen hiring, increased workload, increased the number furlough days (unpaid days off), attacked or violated union contracts, cut wages or positions (fired people outright), increased class sizes, increased tuition, clamped down on student free speech (including police confronting students in their homes in a recent incident in California), and the expansion of the use of contingent faculty (part time, adjunct, Tas, etc) that now is between 40% and 70% depending on the institution. The government's solution to the problem is not to fund education entirely, but to fund it just enough to ease the transition from public to private. For the first time in history, universities that used to cost under $100 per semester because of 80-90% state funding are recieveing a majority of their funding from private sources (students and the private sector). However, students dont get the same level of influence as the private sector in university business, even if they contribute the most to the finances of the university. The only ones who get a say are the bureaucrats in training who run “student” governments.

There is a split developing in higher education in the UK between more academically prestigious institutions where well-off kids can go to study, say, classics, and less prestigious universities where working-class kids will go to do degrees like “leisure and tourism management”, which are basically training for a life of low-paid work. What are the class dynamics of American universities? Are there similar divisions?

Well, the class dynamics of US universities are best described in the California Master Plan for Education devised in the 1960s. This plan was to establish a tiered structure to the state financed schools where the top 15% or so would get into the UC system (and the top of that top into UC Berkeley), the 30% or so below that into the cal state system, and everyone else in community colleges. This system is designed to skim off the best talents and provide them with the best institutions for education. The goal is to use these institutions to train the “best students” into the next layer of the bureaucracy or other “high-skilled” fields. It is very much the same system you describe, and it is not just in California where it operates this way, but it is pretty unanimous troughout the country. Community colleges and lower level state schools are places where “low performing students” coming out of the k-12 system can prove to the upper class that they deserve a better education. Students have to “prove” they deserve the investment, many times while they are working full time, despite the subjective conditions. Only a certain amount of people can make it because of the limited funding, which in the end develops an internal working class status division or grooms new members of the ruling class from the ranks of the working class. The public institutions that are being drastically defunded predominantley serve working-class students. Private instuttions have not taken as big of a hit, though many have used and continue to use the crisis to attack students and workers as well. One thing that is a developing dynamic is the growth of the online university, like Pheonix or DeVry, and over the past year a push from several foundations to create legally for profit higher education. Obviously, this is a ver disturbing trend and indicative of the growing corporatization of education. Students are being treated more and more like products, workers more and more like machines, and massive austerity measures are being carried out on both. The dismantling of this system also serves private interests as a defunded public education system continues to decline. As outcomes decrease, private options that would normally fail in comparison become much more pallateable to people who do not know otherwise. This is exemplified by the charter school movement here in the states, by the movie “Waiting for Superman”, and so on, all which ignore the funding question.

How is the student movement organised? What are the significant political debates and differences within the movement? In the UK we have a slightly unfortunate position where there are at least two competing networks with ostensibly very similar politics which attempt to bring together grassroots anti-cuts and anti-fees struggles into a national body; is there any attempt to unite and coordinate the movement nationally (admittedly a more difficult contention in America than in the UK!)?

Given the much larger geographical landscape, and the fact that the cuts have yet to hit the US in they ways they have in Europe (at least in immediate and drastic terms, aside from a few places) the national struggle around public education is still very much in development. There is no single naitonal student formation that can or does claim lead on the issue. There are several groups involved in various ways and levels from the new Students for a Democratic Society (reformed in 2006) to United Students Agianst Sweatshops, etc. The list is long, but it is clear that no single group can claim to represent a national platform of the struggle that is recognized as such – at least not in the way that you describe. The formaiton I have been working with is a loose coalition of members of various different organizations who operates on an ad-hoc basis and runs the ofllowing website: defendpubliceducation.org

In terms of political debates, we are hoping to ignite a strategic debate soon about how we go about building local power to fuel this movement and what the victories in California, Illinois, NYC, Georgia, etc can tell us about that. We always have debate over the core issues and what demands we should be placing, but since the struggle has yet to really take on a strong naitonal character (IE strong organizing projects in several major areas that make it clear this is a naitonal struggle) many times it is more of a debate along left political lines. With a more developed struggle, the division we currently have will clear itself up, so we are looking to approach that question in a more seirous way.

There seems to have been some relatively severe police repression of student activism recently (something we're also very familiar with). What effect is that having on the movement?

Police repression can operate to do two things – first it can mobilize a base if it is framed correctly. Second, it can demobilize a base if it becomes the focus of the struggle. For instance, a UC Police Dept. Officer recently pulled a gun on students at the protest of the UC regents meeting a few weeks ago. Certainly police brutality is nothing new, as many people have been carried out or attacked by cops over the past year of struggle. But this was something we didn't expect, and was certainly an overreaction on the officer's part. Over the past year, students – particularly students of color – have been tased, beaten with clubs (one almost lost their fingers), trampled by cops, pushed over with fences, etc, but not one time was a live gun pulled on anyone.

In this case, it is important to draw attention to the point, but it is useless to focus the struggle on that individual police officer. The reality is the incident exposed the violence of the regents – they brand peaceful protestors as violent activists while the cop was exonerated for self defense. Well, honestly, students protesting budget cuts and tuition hikes is self defense – against the systemic violence caused by the regents. It is important that we expect more violence, but not let sway us from the path, identify it as we go forward, but keep the focus on the violence committed by the budget cuts and the student response as a natural – and expected – reaction to it. They are taking our access to education away, and we have the right to fight back against it.

The effect the recent incident is having is still unclear, though it was certainly radicalising for many California activists (some dear friends of mine). It will depend on how big of a deal we make, whether it is aobut the individual cop or the cop as an effect of the violent system – without dismissing the importance of recognizing the violence altogether. The important thing is to find the core struggles and continue to fight around them, building the movement as we go, by finding campaigns, identifying targets, and beginning to confront problems building a community of struggle.

As working-class socialists in the student movement a lot of what we say politically is about the need for student struggles to orient to the labour movement and how student-worker unity might be built. We've always looked to the US for some of the most inspiring examples of student-worker unity (e.g. around the living wage movements on campus); could you say a few words about how socialists in the US student movement are advancing these politics, and whether concrete, practical student-worker unity is currently developing?

Yes, there are a few examples that I often use to demonstrate this. The two that stick out the most in regards to the public education struggle are the successes of the Student Worker Action Team (SWAT) at UCBerkeley and the struggles of a united graduate-undergraduate coalition in the University of Illinois system – largely based out of UI Urbana Champaign and UI Chicago.

SWAT, along with others, have been building support for on campus unions, but most significantly have been involved with the struggles of the graduate student instructors (GSI) over the past year or so. SWAT has helped tie the struggles of students to those of GSIs who are not just fighting back against the university, but also against a conservative leadership who is trying to push concessions all while aiming to mobilize its base for a strike. If this strike were to occur, it could be a huge breaking point for the struggle, and could be a huge success for reformers within that union.

In illinois, graduates and unionized graduate student-workers formed a coalition after graudate workers went on stirke a year ago – and won. This unity has lead to a lot of strength on those campuses and is beginning to reach out to other public institutions in the state in hopes of broadening to a statewide focus. They have been just as consistent and committed to the struggle as those at UC Berkeley and have victories to show for it.

Outside of education struggles, there are many success stories to note – USAS in the past year had a win over Russel Athletic. Students in Alabama helped organize university bus drivers, organizations such as Student-Farmworker alliance, Student Labor Action Project, and so on ar emaking a comeback and playing a role not just in workers struggles, but also in the public education fightback.

Overall, the recognition that student and worker interests are one in the same, a revelation that is becoming easier to recognize given corporatizaiton of education, is growing. And it is not just growing in theminds of radical leftists, but seems to be expanding in the minds of the average student as well. I think its important for us to understand this and realize that in order to win anything, we must refuse to fight each other for scraps from the neoliberal table. We must fight for everything – and do so at the same time. When we begin to engage people in these struggles and begin to win, people learn through the experience that we can change the world, especially if we fight together as working people.

As socialists, we must continue to play the role that we always have, being the best organizers – and also make sure that people understand that we aren't just out here because we think we have the best political line or because we want to sell our papers, but because we genuinely and sincerely care about the individual lives of each person we talk too. Here in the states, the left often ignores this core concept to organizing and ends up alienting people who would otherwise struggle with us because we don't listen to them and try to tell them how things should be. We can't rely on the infallibility of our expert political lines (though I know we have the most developed political discussion) and must be willing to let movements make mistakes while maintaining our commitment to the struggle. TO me, it seems that many here jump ship if things aren't going their way and it becomes similar to the situtation you described above – we are all competing for membership, while the movement flounders. Not that we shouldn't recruit, etc. etc. but our main goal in the struggle needs to be the struggle, despite its failures. The US left was strongest when it was deeply involved in the labor movement, something that does not exist on the same level today. Its through this serious commitment that people begin to take anti-capitalists and anti-capitalist ideas seriously.

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