Comments on: YDS Activist Agenda Proposal: Student Debt

By: Austin

Austin — Wed, 25 Jul 2007 17:57:50 +0000

Damn, I have to go but I can’t stop. Check out Mario Savio’s speech from Sproul Plaza at Berkeley in the early 60′s on YouTube, about the commodification of students to be cogs in the machine, and throwing our bodies upon its gears. Remember he had just got back from a summer organizing trip with SNCC to the south, where a number of young black men and their white allies were slain. Also, Stanley Aronowitz’s “The Knowledge Factory” is an excellent book on the socializing mission, corporate interests, research funding, control of thye distribution of social capital, and general structure of the postsecondary education industry (he refuses to call it “higher”). If you’re not thinking of it as an industry, you are living in a dream world, as the national trend toward corporate model administration has extended to public colleges in the most liberal parts of the country, and in private liberal arts colleges like Hampshire, reknowned for its progressive educational philosophy, which has now eliminated tenure for new hires, and has faculty on renewable three year contracts. What academic freedom can one have in such an environment?!

By: Austin

Austin — Wed, 25 Jul 2007 17:47:26 +0000

Oh, and Sallie Mae is a wholly owned subsidiary of Satan.

By: Austin

Austin — Wed, 25 Jul 2007 17:46:43 +0000

This seems like the obvious rallying point for student organizing, and to a lesser degree their parents. In NYC, only 33% of the non-selective public high schools have adequate laboratories to even allow the possibility of a competitive freshman application. Forget, arts funding, and all of this on top of the inequities in standardized testing based on class and ethnicity. The fact that any student that works hard enough to get accepted to college should be able to go without tuition and fees. Living expenses while not working FT should be their only concern. It is an investment in a internationally competitive workforce, reduces unemployment by certifying more qualified workers, results in high tax yields in all areas (income, property, sales) due to higher income earlier in life, it reduces reliance on costly public services, and most importantly, it starts to make good on the American Dream that all are truly equal in fact and not theory. Many, many students in underfunded schools are understandably apathetic to education, or openly hostile, since they can see the inequities in opportunity, so they stop trying. It reinforces our tiered society and its growing gap between rich and poor. It perpetuates cycles of economic depression in poorer communities. Frankly, it seems rather Prussian, calculated to keep the masses of Americans at the most minimal level of education, so they are ignorant of the whys and wherefores of decisionmaking in government, business, and community, and cannot represent their own interests. It reminds me of the Dead Kennedys’ song “Kill the Poor”, which is bloody scary. More later on student debt, the life choices it forces, the 13th Amendment (again) against coerced labor, options for students in public universities to claim the reccommending power in institutional decisionmaking that is often legislated, yet rarely exerted, esp. successfully. Public universities have been the only venues where grad student unions have been recognized, and can be points of incredible strength, esp. when working in conjunction with faculty & staff senates and unions. The AFT has published some useful documents on “shared governance”, and CA’s Ed Code Title V is a great model of student-centered governance legislation. NY students at public colleges enjoy similar rights to *full*, voting participation (except on human resources issues and lawsuits). As Paris preached in ’92, “Being broke is slavery, if your skin is brown, they only want you to stay down.”