The Occupy Wall Street protests have become an important topic on college campuses. At Wesleyan, some of our students have joined the group in Zuccotti Park in New York, and others have found a variety of ways of expressing their support. Given the mainstream media's treatment of the movement, it's easy to mock the lack of clear policy initiatives or to roll one's eyes at the absence of leaders to express a neat list of demands. But in talking with students and reading some of the statements from the Occupy Wall Street participants, it seems to me that we get a pretty clear picture of their discontent. Like many Americans, they are revolted by how huge infusions of money are corrupting our political system. And, they are aghast at the trajectory of increasing inequality.
There is plenty to protest. There is no question that our politicians now spend enormous amounts of time raising money; we all get the robocalls and the junk mail to prove it. And there is little doubt that elected officials make decisions about particular legislation or policy initiatives while considering how those decisions will affect the willingness of their donors to contribute. At least in this way, money is eating away at our increasingly dysfunctional political system. This is not something that other representative democracies accept as a necessary part of politics. We can try to show how the money flows -- that's been one of the tasks of the Wesleyan Media Project -- but we don't stem the tide.
Meanwhile, economic inequality in the country is accelerating in frightening ways. Here are three representative facts from Nicholas Kristof's column from last Sunday's New York Times:
Add to this that in many parts of the country 1 in 5 children are growing up in poverty, and you begin to have a sense of what is fueling the anger of protestors who feel they have to "occupy" public spaces in their own country -- a country they feel is being stolen from them.
How have these trends concerning money and inequality affected life on a university campus? We can see it at either end of the college experience, beginning with access and ending with jobs after graduation. More of our students need financial aid than ever before, and they often need bigger scholarship packages to get through school. We also see the effects of rising inequality in the choices students face when looking for jobs as graduation nears. They hope to have had practical internship experiences to bolster their resumes while undergraduates, and they often worry that the first job they get after college will set them in an income bracket that will frame them for life. They worry that if their education doesn't seem like job training, then it isn't education at all.
But in the campus's classrooms, concert halls, theaters and sports facilities, I see little evidence of the pernicious economic-political trends poisoning the country at large. That's because the educational enterprise assumes a core egalitarianism linked to freedom and participation; that's because as teachers we are committed to equality of opportunity for our students and to their freedom to participate as they wish in the educational enterprise. In big lecture halls, students can't buy the best seats or arrange for extra help sessions with their parents' checkbooks. In small seminars, there is a face-to-face equality altered only by the talent, ambition and creativity of the discussion participants. Differences often quickly emerge, but these are the differences of performance -- variations able to emerge exactly because of the environment of equality and freedom.
As a university president, I do spend a lot of my time fundraising. And I am grateful for the generosity of alumni and foundations who support our financial aid and academic programs. But I am also a professor, and this support has no impact on my teaching role or on the role of my colleagues in the classroom. Now I know that this will strike some readers as impossibly idealistic. After all, some of our students have had great help along the way, while others have had to struggle alone. Some come from wealthy families, others from backgrounds of poverty. There is no doubt that some students are better prepared than others, and that some of that preparation was facilitated by wealth. Still, in the campus culture at schools like Wesleyan, these advantages of birth or luck don't mean much over time. In order to learn, you have to park your privilege at the classroom door. In order to teach effectively, we try to ensure that our students have an equality of opportunity that doesn't erase their differences. Furthermore, in those schools that have protected the autonomy of professors, students come to see intellectual freedom modeled by their instructors in ways not dependent on wealth.
When inequality is a charged political problem, as it is right now in the United States, it is because efforts to scale back disparities of wealth are seen as an assault on freedom. Increased state power is often needed to redistribute wealth, and many (and not only those with the money) see this as the growth of tyranny. Of course, increased state power is also used to protect wealth, which creates its own assaults on freedom. Universities and colleges are lucky insofar as they still have an ethos of equality that is linked to freedom in the classroom and around campus. You don't need strong central power to ensure this. That's why efforts to control speech with university regulations are rightly seen (by either the Left or the Right) as anathema to the educational enterprise. But graduation into a world in which inequality is ever more powerful comes as a rude awakening.
The campus as a place of equality and freedom has deep roots in America, at least as far back as Thomas Jefferson. Even with all his prejudices, he favored education at the public expense to prevent the creation of permanent elites based on wealth who would try to turn the government's powers to their own private advantage. Jefferson believed strongly that given the variability in human capacities and energy there would always be elites -- his notion of equality was an equality of access or opportunity not an equality in which everybody wins. But he also believed strongly that without a serious effort to find and cultivate new talent, the nation's elites would harden into an "unnatural aristocracy," increasingly privileged, corrupt and inept.
From Jefferson to our own day, we have preserved the belief that education allows for the experience of freedom as one's capacities are enhanced and brought into use. The author of the Declaration of Independence wanted university students to make these discoveries for themselves, not to be told to study certain fields because their futures had already been decided by their families, teachers, churches or government. Jefferson saw education as a key to preventing permanent, entrenched inequality.
Citizens are feeling they have to "occupy" the public spaces of their own country because they believe their land is being appropriated by entrenched elites. The call to "occupy" is very similar to the Tea Party cry to "take back" our country. Can we find a way to take the experiences of freedom and equality we find in education at its best and translate them to the sphere of politics and society more broadly without at the same time increasing governmental tendencies toward tyranny? Of course, higher education has its own dilemmas of fairness and of elitism, but that does not absolve us of the responsibility to connect in positive ways what we value in research and learning to our contemporary political situation. To make these connections productive, universities must at the very least serve as models: they must continue to strive to be places where young people discover and cultivate their independence and must themselves resist the trends of inequality that are tearing at the fabric of our country.
The problems in primary, secondary, and post-secondary education will not be fixed unless the problems are addressed from both ends. In the meantime, all of us, but especially those of us at the bottom end, will be served best by accepting some personal responsibility WHILE we do what we can to bring about change on the larger front.
(Background and full disclosure: I am currently writing my dissertation, fully expecting to defend it this summer, at Claremont Graduate University, an institution with which Roth was formerly affiliated and a member of the same consortium as Scripps College, where Roth used to work. I have well over $100,000 in loan debt, from CGU, after managing to work and squeak through community college and state university on the east coast with no student-loan debt.)
The same goes for being less prepared. Yes, serious problems need to be addressed so that more children can receive quality K-12 education, whether that prepares them for college or prepares them to be responsible, critical, informed, non-degree-seeking-but-equally-intelligent-and-valuable-hard-working-well-compensated citizens. BUT, we also need to accept some responsibility for our own education and preparation and teach our children to do likewise. I went through community college, state university, and graduate school, and I've taught or assisted teaching in all of those contexts in addition to private universities, and I have watched a gradual, but recently accelerated increase in students' sense of entitlement combined with a comparably paced decline in willingness to accept personal responsibility, regardless of race or socioeconomic status.
(cont...)
On the other hand, while I agree that the growing divide between classes is alarming and worrisome (and make no mistake, I'm on the bottom end of the divide) and I agree that the student loan process is in grave need of reform, I am one of those students who chose to take out loans to pursue a degree that likely fits into the category of having low employment prospects and I think too many of my peers and similar students in the generation behind mine are pointing the finger at everyone other than themselves. I decided to take out that loan and pursue that degree. We all did. Was there some pressure? Sure, this was what we wanted to do with our lives and we didn't see another way to achieve it, at least not easily, and not right away. But I doubt that many of us were unaware that the job prospects for the degrees we sought were paltry. I doubt that many of us were unaware, or unable to project, that the final loan debt was going to be on a par with (or far exceeding, depending on one's geographic location) a mortgage, but without the collateral that property provides. Yes, something must be done to fix the system, but we must also accept some of the responsibility ourselves and teach our children to do the same.
(cont...)
Yes, SOME of your students come from wealthy families, and SOME others come from poverty, but that difference in preparation that you state makes so little difference at Wesleyan most likely made a big difference in the K-12 and SAT performance (and high school counselor encouragement to consider applying to college) of many of the students who either were not accepted or didn't even consider trying to get into Wesleyan.
(Incidentally, I'd be interested in knowing the ratio between those two.)
What percentage of the bigger number of "less" prepared students are represented in whatever number apply and are accepted into Wesleyan? What, if anything is Wesleyan doing to address that larger inequality? These days, the vast majority of universities, including elite universities, admit and give substantial support to some percentage of students that come from underrepresented, low income families, so that, in itself is not anything for an individual institution to really rave about.
Until elite universities (with the fabulous endowments that are cited by one of the commenters) do something to address the greater inequality, self-congratulations on this front are not merited.
(cont...)
You write:
"I see little evidence of the pernicious economic-political trends poisoning the country at large. That's because the educational enterprise assumes a core egalitarianism linked to freedom and participation... Differences … are the differences of performance -- variations able to emerge exactly because of the environment of equality and freedom."
That might well be true, AFTER one is accepted to Wesleyan. You raise some very good points in the next paragraph, but then fail to see that the very factors you raise as not making a big difference AT Wesleyan, almost certainly make a difference for getting INTO Wesleyan in the first place. Again, you write:
"some of our students have had great help along the way, while others have had to struggle alone. Some come from wealthy families, others from backgrounds of poverty. There is no doubt that some students are better prepared than others, and that some of that preparation was facilitated by wealth. Still, in the campus culture at schools like Wesleyan, these advantages of birth or luck don't mean much over time."
(cont...)
I do hope you will take the time to reply to some of these comments (my own, to follow, included). Some of the commenters raise valid points, while others have failed to read your article closely, and/or failed to read some of the astute clarifications provided by other commenters, before shooting off with their own uninformed point of view. But again, let's remember that some have raised some very legitimate points. I hope that my comments will do the same.
(For anyone interested in the perspective from which I write, it is included toward the end, which means its in a follow up comment, since I’m limited to 250 words…)
It's not immediately clear to me whether "you" (or Wesleyan, which I assume is what most commenters mean) are part of the problem, as some have alleged. I can certainly see how you might be. It's less clear to me that you are part of the solution or that any self-congratulations are due (which, in all fairness to the understandably irked commenters, does seem to be taking place in this article).
(...to be continued)
-AJB
And speaking of soldiers, why should they have to spend even a dollar of out of pocket expenses for colleges. Everything should be free to them as that should be our commitment to them for letting our government destroy their lives.
A number of these protesters complain that they are saddled with debt from university loans and are unable to find employment. Colleges aggressively market degrees in spite of the fact that graduates with these degrees are in low demand among employers. So students are encouraged to enroll in programs with little chance of employment upon graduation that also saddle them with debt. Again, this is not evidence of a just university educational system.
Finally, you act as though money has no influence on the campus. Yet, free and easy money in the form of guaranteed loans does corrupt. Any rational banker would be dissuaded from offering a loan to a perspective Anthropology, Black Studies, Feminist Studies or English Literature student and rightly so. Graduates of these programs have poor employment prospects upon completion of their degrees, so how could they expect to pay off their student debt. But these loans are guaranteed, so loans that would otherwise be denied are approved in spite of the fact that students will be unable to pay them off. Is this just?
You are the 1%, Mr. Roth! Unless you implement this, you have no commitment to equality.
Support the movement or get out of the way!
Or are you intentionally proposing Communism?
That is hardly what the Occupiers are advocating.
Support the movement of get out of the way!
So--lets pay faculty at publicly funded universities similar salaries as managers of Departments at other state agencies. For example, why not pay the Dean of the agriculture school at x university the same as the Head of that State's Ag Dept? The President of University Y should certainly be paid less than the Governor that same state. Assistant Professors in Biology should be paid the same as enttry level PhD level biologists at the State's dept of Health, Fish & Wildlife, whatever. Coaches should be paid the same as faculty. Scholarship athletes should be paid the same as Graduate teaching Assistants.
This would significantly knock down the cost of a college degree at a publicly funded university. Could private schools pay more? sure--but they couldnt absorb all of the talented academics whose salaries would be brought back to real world levels! What about research grants etc? Yes--they would fund grad students & post-docs, pay for equipment etc---but the rest would go back to the university.
think how affordable a degree would become if the faculty & administrators were paid the same as other public employeees and monies from research grants went to reduce tuition/provide GRANTS--not loans?
Who says you have to go to an elite college? I know some extremely wealthy people (who earned it, not inherited it) who either went to state universities (and not Michigan, Illinois, Texas, Cal, or UCLA) or small liberal arts colleges you never heard of.