Michael Fabricant - Austerity Blues: Fighting for the Soul of Public Higher Education

AUSTERITY BLUES

AUSTERITY BLUES

Fighting for the Soul of Public Higher Education

MICHAEL FABRICANT & STEPHEN BRIER

Johns Hopkins University Press

Baltimore

2016 Johns Hopkins University Press

All rights reserved. Published 2016

Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Fabricant, Michael, author. | Brier, Stephen, 1946 author.

Title: Austerity blues : fighting for the soul of public higher education / Michael Fabricant and Stephen Brier.

Description: Baltimore, Maryland : Johns Hopkins University Press, 2016. | Includes bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2015049916 | ISBN 9781421420677 (hardcover : alk. paper) | ISBN 9781421420684 (electronic) | ISBN 1421420678 (hardcover : alk. paper) | ISBN 1421420686 (electronic)

Subjects: LCSH: Public universities and collegesUnited StatesFinance. | Education, HigherUnited StatesFinance. | Government aid to higher educationUnited States. | Federal aid to higher educationUnited States. | Higher education and stateUnited States. | College costsUnited States. | Student loansUnited States.

Classification: LCC LB2342 .F34 2016 | DDC 378/.05dc23 LC record available at http://lccn.loc.gov/2015049916

A catalog record for this book is available from the British Library.

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To our grandchildren

Kioka, Amelia, Lucas, and Ariel

and

Nate

in the hope that a vibrant public university that was so important in their grandfathers lives and careers will be there for them as well

[CONTENTS]

AUSTERITY BLUES

Introduction

For, while the tale of how we suffer and how we are delighted, and how we may triumph is never new, it always must be heard. There isnt any other tale to tell, its the only light weve got in all this darkness.James Baldwin, Sonnys Blues

Writing this book has allowed us to reflect on a time and place that made a decisive difference in both of our lives. College was unfamiliar to both of our working-class families, one on the West Coast, the other in the East. It nevertheless fueled aspirations and hope as a portal to a different life. One of our fathers said: You will do better than me working with your mind and not your hands. The other said: I didnt work all my life in a factory so you could work in a factory, too. What each of them did not say, but believed, was that college was a place where ideas mattered and their sons mind would be nurtured. And so our parents imagined that there were untold opportunities, economic and intellectual, hidden behind ivory towers and that those opportunities would transport their children to places unknown. In turn, we both held the deep belief that a university experience and a college degree would prove transformative in our own lives. Our parents dreams and our own aspirations were not disappointed. Indeed, our university experiences altered our individual and collective experiences. It was so life-altering, both of us decided to organize our lives around university citizenship as faculty members. Needless to say, we have not been disappointed in our choices.

We both entered college as white, working-class men in a remarkable, all-too-brief moment in the history of higher education when dramatic growth brought the contemporary public university into being. During the long decade of the 1960s, anything and everything seemed possible, as social movements emerged to challenge political, economic, and intellectual orthodoxies. One of the centers of turmoil was public higher education. From Berkeley to Michigan to New York City, student ferment fed the larger social justice movement taking shape outside university walls. The conflict inside the public university was no less intense. The movement from the classroom into the community; the entry of subordinated knowledge of race, gender, and class into academic discourse; and the push to actively situate student and faculty voices in a university decision-making process increasingly dominated by administrators all turned out to be significant sites of struggle. In that consequential decade we were both very much engaged in the work of redefining and remaking public higher education. We made connections as students between the politics of the antiwar and antiracism movements and the public university as an epicenter of critical social struggles. We were shaped intellectually and politically during that era. Matters of race, class, gender, power, the public good, and the meaning of public education coursed through our academic work, our classroom teaching, and our political organizing choices. It was in the public university during that era where we learned that the external world of political economy and our own interior lives were inseparable. These worlds had to be linked to be understood. That struggle for unification has marked much of our academic work ever since.

The opportunities we had to choose lives of the mind and political agency, however, were not accidental. Our individual aspirations were linked to a political topography of intense class conflict dating back to the Great Depression. That struggle, led in large part by labor unions and leftist political parties, produced a shift in the roles and functions of the state. It was within this context that governmental institutions assumed more and more social responsibility for citizens. New programs were created and laws passed to protect working people from the negative consequences of the labor market (e.g., the National Labor Relations and Social Security acts). Substantially greater public investment was made in the postwar era, especially in education and health care, which rewarded veterans returning from World War II with a variety of benefits and, in turn, created a more productive workforce.

We have both been beneficiaries of those gains and the conflicts out of which they arose. We struggled, first as students and then as teachers and scholars, to carry forward the class politics of the 1930s by incorporating a vision of race, gender, and later, sexuality into our work. The successful progressive political struggles that preceded our entry into public higher education in the 1960s afforded us access to the full-time faculty necessary for positive classroom experiences and tuition that was affordable or even free, both made possible by substantial state subsidies.

No matter the historic contributions of public higher education, it is important not to romanticize either its intellectual risk taking or its academic independence. It remains firmly embedded in the apparatus of the state and the larger market-based economy. At its best, public higher education has had goals that were often contradictory. These tensions have been grounded in historical and contemporary academic discourse, employment opportunities, democratic participation, centralized administrative prerogatives, and finally, the scope and nature of dissent. What makes the public university unique is that such contradictions have been tolerated, if not always nurtured. The light shed by the contemporary public university on contentious issuesoften defined by unpopular discourse, contradiction, political struggle, and dissentis a flickering candle.