Organizing to Fight Institutional Debt

Lend and Rule: Fighting the Shadow Financialization of Public Universities by the Coalition Against Campus Debt. Common Notions Press, 2024.

Everyone committed to the reconstruction of higher education as a public good should read the book Lend and Rule. It provides an accessible analysis of neoliberal financialization of higher education and serves as a manual for organizing alliances against institutional debt and for demanding that college and university systems become what the authors call “publicly-funded, working-class sites of possibility.” The Coalition Against Campus Debt—a group of scholars, writers, and organizers who have hands-on experience with activism on their campuses and beyond—translates its sophisticated understanding of a seemingly arcane issue into a ground-level perspective with accessible language tied to specific tactics. As the book states, the group is not interested in a research project; instead, coalition members are dedicated to fostering a movement to oppose institutional debt and its central role in the neoliberal economy, which has converted our colleges and universities into “machines for private wealth extraction at the expense of students, workers, and communities.”

The book’s language, tone, and stories demonstrate the authors’ immersion in organizing. The text is easy to read and offers pragmatic guidance as well as inspiration. The authors argue for the necessity of short-term reformist goals because of the urgency of preventing the accrual of more debt by institutions, but they also advocate long-term revolutionary change to create higher education systems that “serve as sites of resistance, empowerment, and promise.”

Throughout the book, their aspirational call to actively fight debt remains bound to practical knowledge of bureaucratic unions, campus administrations, and state governments and the arduous realities of maintaining progressive democratic efforts. Do not reinvent the wheel, the authors argue. Identify and utilize “existing organizational infrastructure to bring people in.” Other valuable lessons include the importance of reciprocal communication and coordination with students and the central role of political education both to raise awareness of institutional debt and to show all faculty and staff that their working conditions are shaped by debt. Debt is a labor issue that should be taken up by campus unions.

The book is divided into an introduction and six chapters. The introduction describes how the coalition came together at virtual meetings of the Public Higher Education Workers (PHEW) network, formed by the media and organizing project Labor Notes as a collective of higher education union members “attempting to transform and democratize their unions.” Chapter 1 provides a straightforward analysis of university operations in a neoliberal debt economy. Familiar language and simple explanations illuminate the problem while offering content for a counternarrative that can challenge the neoliberal narrative of hyperindividualism, with its financial business jargon that mystifies even as it persuades audiences of its unquestionable neutral logic. Such a counternarrative must be brief and captivating, deploying pointed concepts with emotional appeal, such as “higher education as a public good for all students, faculty, and staff” or “let’s build the shared public education system students, faculty, staff, and communities deserve.” The demystification continues in chapter 2, where the coalition defines the cast of characters, including credit rating agencies and insurance companies as well as borrowers and creditors.

The book moves into organizing strategy in chapter 3, which outlines a general approach and specific examples from Salem State University. The authors advise activists to form groups, do their own research without experts, and shift rapidly into arranging a “debt reveal.” In a reveal, the group showcases its debt findings with eye-catching flyers, campus publications, and social media and then schedules a gathering on campus or Zoom to break down the information. Reveal events make the costs of institutional debt accessible and clear and help organize people for the fight. Chapters 4, 5, and 6 each explain organizing and outcomes in four different settings. The examples in chapter 4 come from the City University of New York and West Chester University in Pennsylvania and “illustrate the highly classed and racialized foundations of public higher education debt financing.” Chapter 5 follows the fight in the Massachusetts State Universities that led to an ongoing collaboration with the Massachusetts Teachers Association for the Fair Share Amendment. Voters passed the amendment in 2022 after eight years of organizing. It requires an additional 4 percent tax on income over $1 million, and revenues must be allocated to public education and public transportation. Both West Chester University and the Massachusetts State Universities have histories of building dormitories with debt from private funding schemes, which raises questions about funding sources for the construction of gyms, stadiums, and cafeterias. Chapter 6 draws much-needed attention to the connections linking colonialism, neoliberalism, and debt, with insightful analysis of the history of the University of Puerto Rico system and its struggle against colonial economic policies. The organizers linked the loss of employment benefits to the fight to restore UPR’s funding and gathered university workers from eleven campuses at informational forums.

The Coalition Against Campus Debt makes the point that “debt is at the heart of the neoliberal economy and should be centered in any theoretical, tactical, and strategic plan to transform our education institutions and the political economy they exist within.” While admitting that ending debt in higher education will not overthrow the entire neoliberal economy, the authors argue that higher education is a strategic site from which to wage this battle. They hope more activists reach out to all faculty and staff, nurture relationships with students, set achievable goals to keep people excited, and plan some events with joy and creativity, such as dancing and chalk art.

The book calls on organizers to commit to the long-term changes necessary for revolutionary transformation. The guidance about how to “be prepared” is particularly helpful. Pragmatic rather than pessimistic, it encourages camaraderie and reads like a tactical conversation among activists. The authors reach for a utopian vision while also celebrating how the struggle itself constitutes an immediate experience of freedom as well as the means to the vision. Appendixes A and B, with clear steps for launching a debt reveal, serve the same purpose of intertwining idealism with functional planning.

The authors repeatedly note that institutional reliance on debt is both a political and an economic decision. They also discuss the role of narrative and its power to cultivate hyperindividualism and naturalize “the market” as a logical force that cannot be fully understood by ordinary people, which works to normalize the obfuscation of financial details. Their general comments about narrative underscore the significance of meaning-making and cultural production, making it clear that institutional debt depends on and perpetuates cultural as well as political and economic structures. When ideas become naturalized and internalized, as neoliberal narratives have become, evidence in counterarguments is not enough. Although the authors do not refer directly to what Pierre Bourdieu calls the field of cultural production or to Raymond Williams’s concept of cultural formations with structures of feeling, their approach touches on the necessity of fighting in the arena of popular culture. They suggest, for example, that readers prepare for the opposition’s neoliberal narrative of “debt as a good investment” and engage with the media and in public spaces to change the mainstream conversation.

If the Coalition Against Campus Debt gets the opportunity to publish a new edition, online courses and AI will need attention. In Connecticut, with its Democratic governor and legislative assembly (as the coalition indicates, neoliberalism is a bipartisan project), the state system’s board of regents paid for its Scaling Taskforce Report to promote a shift of funds to Charter Oak State College, a fully online institution, to develop courses with AI and Coursera rather than with faculty. The proposal includes a push to increase enrollment from two thousand to six thousand students by 2029 to “maximize economies of scale” and offer a tuition-free online bachelor’s degree. Physical state campuses with in-person classes will lose students.

The scheme will also exacerbate the current decline of liberal arts majors as students concerned about loan debt “gravitate toward degrees they think will give them a greater return on investment”—choices often driven more by cultural narratives than by quantitative data. The Scaling Taskforce Report exemplifies debt funding as a labor issue and shows how proponents of neoliberalism can appropriate progressive ideas in the cultural arena to meet their own political and economic ends. Organizers fighting debt must push their own appealing, concise narrative that tuition-free college without public funding for fair labor and in-person learning eviscerates both full-time employment for faculty and staff and full-time teaching, advising, and mentoring for students. As this book emphasizes, working conditions are learning conditions. We are all interconnected.

Lend and Rule is a crucial contribution to the growing range of resources for effectively engaging in budget activism. Faculty, staff, and students do not have to become forensic accountants or finance banking experts to challenge the debt regime. They can focus on basic debt numbers, organize a debt reveal, and gain momentum to reconstruct higher education as a public good. The coalition authors have committed to the long fight and given readers the tools to join them.

Note: The fall 2022 special issue of Academe, “Revolutionizing Higher Education Budget and Finance,” included online resources for readers to load their organizing toolkits: https://www.aaup.org/article/budget-and-finance-rucksack.

Aimee Loiselle is assistant professor of history at Central Connecticut State University.