Sen. Bernie Sanders and Reps. Ilhan Omar and Pramila Jayapal want to cancel your student debt — every last penny. In June the trio introduced the College for All Act of 2019 that would eliminate all $1.6 trillion in student loans currently on the books. The bill would also make public college free.
Such a proposal is a bold rejection of decades of prevailing policy wisdom regarding the purpose of higher education and how we should finance it. But how did we get to the point where the idea of education as a human right and a public good is back on the table, and where free college and debt cancellation on a mass scale are being advanced by members of Congress, including a top presidential candidate?
One answer is grass-roots organizing by people who have been fighting on this front for years, including members of an organization that I helped to co-found, the Debt Collective.
In 2015, our members who had attended for-profit Corinthian College started the first debt strike in U.S. history. That’s why, when Sanders, Omar, and Jayapal introduced the College for All Act, Debt Collective members were among those standing shoulder to shoulder with them speaking out in favor of the bill on the Senate lawn.
You know who didn’t speak at the event? Professors, college administrators — not a single one addressed the crowd. Indeed, Representative Omar credited activists and organizers, not academics, with inspiring a bill that could lead to a transformational change.
The fact is that most elite academics have been absent from the political fight for free college. (Scholars in the mold of Adolph Reed Jr., Nathan Brown, Tressie McMillan Cottom, and Chris Newfield, are the exceptions that prove the rule.) And yet, discussions about what a democratic higher-education system might look like ought to be conducted, first and foremost, within the academy itself.
How did we get to the point where the idea of education as a public good is back on the table? One answer is grass-roots organizing.
Of course, such discussions do take place in certain corners of academe, but they have demonstrably failed to rise to the level of collective urgency or attain the sort of public influence that is desperately needed. The fact that the battle for free college has been mostly ceded to organizers and activists outside the academy reveals a shameful disconnect between those whose institutional security means they have the least to lose from taking a stand and the excluded majority — including debt strikers — who are doing the real work to organize at the grass-roots level and pressure lawmakers to take action.
Indeed, it was the strikers’ slogan, “we are the first generation made poor by the business of education,” that helped to broadcast the reality that higher education is an elite space that most cannot access due to high cost and admissions policies that favor affluent students. The slogan helped get the attention of officials in Washington. In the midst of the strike, a group of organizers and strikers and I attended a meeting at the Department of Education. There, federal officials, including Undersecretary Ted Mitchell, listened to stories of financial ruin as a result of predatory student debt. Ann Bowers had come from Tennessee to make sure Mitchell understood the stakes for debtors like her: “What am I supposed to do if I can’t pay this debt?” she asked. “Should I take my dog and go live in a box on the street?”
In the months that followed, there was an outpouring of support for the strikers in the media and online. What we lacked was support from the faculty and administrators at prestigious institutions, especially those who were in positions to amplify, explain, and justify to the public our struggle for a more democratic education system.
This collective failure to strategically explain what an education is for and why people should want one — indeed, why they ought to fight tooth and nail for that right — has had profoundly negative consequences. It has permitted politicians and billionaire philanthropists to make the case that the purpose of education ought to be job training (especially for working-class students), and that college majors that supposedly don’t lead to employment are at best a luxury and at worst kind of silly. The more oxygen these arguments take up in our public discourse, the further they weaken support for public higher education and erode sympathy for those who have been crushed by the system we have now. In a context of drastic wealth inequality, it is perfectly reasonable for people to decide that if the skills and knowledge acquired at college don’t immediately lead to a job, then the whole enterprise is a waste of time and the public shouldn’t fund it.
It is time that more higher-education professionals, especially those who have institutional standing, advance the cause of democracy in higher education.
The good news is that progress may be on the horizon. The College for All Act was partly inspired by a report produced by scholars at the Levy Economics Institute of Bard College showing that canceling all student debt would provide a significant boost to the economy. After the act was introduced, more than 100 academics signed on to a letter of support. “Nothing short of a complete overhaul of our public higher-education system will suffice,” they wrote. To complement such bold declarations, tenured faculty and high-ranking administrators should take action: They should work together to coordinate a serious public-relations campaign to explain what education is and why providing the opportunity to learn and grow — even if it means studying subjects maligned as “pointless” — is actually the point.
Public universities must also do more to actively support grass-roots organizing like the kind that helped pave the way to the College for All Act. Are there groups on campus that can be mobilized to organize for the law’s passage? Are faculty members collaborating with activists on the front lines? Following prominent examples like the Institute on Inequality and Democracy at UCLA, are institutions making resources, including money, available to local organizers? These are some questions that academics should be asking themselves if they want more democracy and less elitism in higher education, which is the same thing as saying they want their professions to continue to exist.
Moreover, academics need to understand what happened after debt strikers met with officials from the Obama administration in 2015. The Department of Education agreed that predatory debts should be canceled and developed a program for doing so. They dragged their feet on carrying it out, though, most likely because they assumed that the Hillary Clinton administration would finish the job. When Betsy DeVos became secretary of education, she halted the relief program.
The Obama administration’s unnecessary delay and the Trump administration’s outright hostility toward debtors put the political nature of the battle into stark relief. The fact that just demands, even those supported by leading elected officials, can be ignored by those in power has made a demonstrable impact on policy discussions. Julie Margetta Morgan, a former adviser to Sen. Elizabeth Warren, recently remarked that the Debt Collective’s campaign “was eye-opening for many” in the policy world. It helped to “make people more comfortable with the argument that sometimes debt has to be just wiped away.” Impossible to have imagined just a few years ago, this is an extraordinarily revealing statement from a policy adviser who came to a new understanding by watching an organizing campaign unfold.
Meeting this moment of promise and possibility will require collaboration and mass mobilization.
By winning student-debt cancellation for a subset of borrowers, the Debt Collective helped to lay the groundwork for a total student-debt jubilee. Indeed, with the College for All Act, Sanders, Omar and Jayapal have taken the argument that “sometimes debt has to be just wiped away” to its logical next step: All student debt should be canceled because education is a public good and a human right. We will need a big movement to win that right. To join it, higher-education professionals must learn two critical lessons. First, if demands that were once considered unrealistic are now mainstream policy positions, it is not because big ideas trickled down from on high; it is because ordinary people got organized and started agitating. Second, if higher education is in crisis, as is commonly argued in the pages of The Chronicle and elsewhere, then it is not because academic work per se is disconnected from the broader public; it is because a quality higher education has increasingly become the exclusive province of the rich.
Take the experiences of the Corinthian debt strikers. None described college as a place one goes to learn for learning’s sake. They were more likely to regard education as an escape from the brutality of the labor market, where wages have been stagnant for decades and where unions are in decline. To many aspiring students, education is something that other people get to pursue while they pay a high price for vocational training, which comes with no guarantee that graduates won’t end up even worse off than before. Yasmin Nair put our society’s failure in stark terms:
The loss of public higher education to vast swaths of the population, not coincidentally people of color, more often women than men, is a form of violence — the violence of absolute exclusion. This is exclusion not only from the “opportunity” that higher-education pundits like to talk about, but the exclusion from, dare we say, the life of the mind, the pursuit of knowledge — the useless knowledge engaged by areas like philosophy, the arts, the humanities in general.
Meeting this moment of promise and possibility will require collaboration and mass mobilization. While ordinary people develop militant institutions like the Debt Collective from which they can wield class power, academics who want to see transformative change must use their positions to help win back the promise of college as a necessary and vital public good.
Ann Larson holds a Ph.D. in English from the CUNY Graduate Center. She is co-founder and co-director of the Debt Collective.
