These days American higher education —much envied, once seemingly impregnable—has found itself settling into a deep funk. Suffering from plummeting endowments and overextended commitments, institutions everywhere are having to make hard, pragmatic concessions to fiscal exigencies. Even the Ivies are learning to make do. Apparently, according to the New York Times, Harvard’s Widener Library has withdrawn complimentary pastries. The already-have-nots can now jeer, but no one can gainsay the Great Recession’s deleterious effects.
These days American higher education —much envied, once seemingly impregnable—has found itself settling into a deep funk. Suffering from plummeting endowments and overextended commitments, institutions everywhere are having to make hard, pragmatic concessions to fiscal exigencies. Even the Ivies are learning to make do. Apparently, according to the New York Times, Harvard’s Widener Library has withdrawn complimentary pastries. The already-have-nots can now jeer, but no one can gainsay the Great Recession’s deleterious effects.
Where education is concerned, it appears the privatization of the republic may be coming to a head. Nearly from the republic’s inception, the nation’s leadership class had convinced itself of the civic virtues of an educated citizenry. “No republic can maintain itself in strength” without it, Thomas Jefferson wrote to John Tyler in 1810. It alone would “enable every man to judge for himself what will secure or endanger his freedom.”11xThomas Jefferson to John Tyler, 1810: . In modern times the blue-to-white-collar conversion of our economy from raw resources and industrial manufacturing to information and sophisticated technologies bolstered Jeffersonian virtue with a strong dose of Millsian self-interest. Add into this mix Congress’s passage of the 1944 GI Bill, which inundated higher education with millions of average American males, and there is the basis of our official ideology. For years it has had us believing that, as the president of the University of California Student Association, Victor Sanchez, put it, education is “a right, and not necessarily a privilege.”22x1 Victor Sanchez, comments delivered at “Is College Only for the Rich? Student Organizing for College Affordability Event,” Campus Progress Forum (2 December 2009). Increasingly, fewer can afford to foot the bill, including now the state, which has been steadily disinvesting for years.
Not since the sixties have official ideology and institutional practices grown so widely misaligned in so short a period of time as in today’s Great Recession. The debate about the U.S.’s commitment to public education is starting to foment on multiple fronts, not only among old-school leftists and educational ideologues. “There is really a lot of anger over what is going on with our public institution,” says Sanchez, who represents 200,000 hard-hit students. Since 2001 U.C. student fees have spiked 160 percent, not counting the regents’ most recent hike of 32 percent, which threatens to push more underrepresented students out of the system. “Opportunity is dwindling,” Sanchez explains. “Right now you are seeing a lot of mobilization around the resistance of it turning into more and more of a private university system like structure.”33xSanchez. In solidarity, over one hundred far-flung organizations, including sixteen chapters of Students for a Democratic Society (SDS), signed onto a pledge to make March 4 a “National Day of Action to Defend Education.”44xMarch 4, National Day of Action to Defend Education.
The University of California has become the touchstone of a “new student movement,” Sanchez and others believe. For members of the original student movement, a key point of contention was the system’s too-rapid expansion, whereas today’s problem, especially in California, is its precipitous contraction. Mario Savio’s incendiary December 1964 slam against the “multiversity”—“You’ve got to put your bodies upon the wheels, upon the levers, upon all the apparatus, and you’ve got to make it stop”—is being replayed for inspiration and historical context. Channeling Savio, reports connecting old-to-new are prone to focus on the frisson of civil rights sit-ins, Vietnam protests, and errant rabble-rousing without recognizing some of the deeper cultural connections that join the two. What is taking place is not simply a revolt over tuition fees, although there is something to that. Rather, the university and the public are being asked to own up to a widening deficit of trust that calls into question the commitment of the republic to an educated citizenry.