To accompany our reading this week from Steve Brier and Michael Fabricant, I thought I’d share a snippet of this short Jacobin article on austerity, the COVID-19 crisis, and the current and future infrastructure of higher education.
“Crises, Naomi Klein reminds us, are periods of undoing, as society’s key institutions shutter and collapse. But they can also be moments of redoing, as new structures emerge from the rubble…
How our universities get remade in the wake of a global pandemic is a matter of crucial public significance, fundamentally entrenched in questions of power, redistribution, and democracy. It should not be relegated to technocratic engineering and management. Now is a time to advance far-reaching egalitarian programs, to align our universities with crucial public needs rather than market conceits. The future of our universities will be shaped by the movements that rise up to fight for them.
In the coming weeks, the calls to resuscitate our collapsing higher education institutions should be evaluated according to three fundamental values that ought to underpin institutions of higher learning: How can COVID-19 responses deepen and expand democracy on campuses? Will matters of crucial public significance be collectively determined, or swept under the auspices of technocratic decision-makers? How will future access to resources — financial, instructional, material — be equitably distributed in universities? How will we govern and organize ourselves — both within and across institutions — to foster solidarity, rather than division and zero-sum competition?
The answers to these questions rest on the social struggles and organizing that occur in the coming weeks. As the COVID-19 conversation moves from crisis to recovery, we need to both resist austerity on our campuses and fundamentally reimagine how they operate and whose interests they serve. Simply returning to normal won’t be good enough.”
