As the contradictions of universities organized for capitalist and imperialist interests become more clear, the new student and worker movement in higher education has the opportunity to clearly articulate and fight for the type of university we want: one that defends the interests of the working class and oppressed.
October 31, 2024
Source: Left Voice
This past year in the U.S., a new chapter in class struggle has been written. Students, many from the Palestinian diaspora, anti-Zionist Jewish people, leftists, and people of conscience of all stripes have stood up against the genocide in Gaza. They have built encampments and questioned universities that run like businesses with investments in Israel. They have faced off the repression of university administrators while unmasking the imperialist character of both the Democrats and Republicans in office who help to send the police to beat up students and workers.
Broader sectors of U.S. society have also witnessed the unprecedented curtailing of democratic rights and the rise of a 21st-century McCarthyist witch hunt. Led by the Far Right, these anti-democratic attacks are supported by the broader regime, targeting anyone who dares to speak out against the genocide in institutions that are technically supposed to be bastions of free speech and academic freedom. These attacks have led professors and community members to defend basic democratic rights as the student movement came under attack this past year.
These conflicts have erupted in a specific context: the neoliberalization of universities. For years, government officials and university administrators have drastically cut university budgets, resulting in layoffs, the elimination of entire departments, and the increased adjunctification of university professors. After years of passivity, academic workers have been fighting back against precarious conditions with increased unionization and strikes at universities.
Universities carry an important weight in U.S. society and the economy. After all, they are where over 18 million people study and 4 million people work. But on a deeper level, recent events have opened up debate and discussion over the role of universities — from the historic revitalization of a student movement that challenges imperialism, to the right-wing culture wars in which universities and schools have become ground zero for unprecedented draconian measures.
Erik Baker, an activist within the Harvard Academic Workers union and a professor at Harvard, recently elaborated on the delegitimization of U.S. universities. As he points out in his essay, universities were once the kind of institution that fostered postwar ideals, like democratic engagement and cultural enrichment. At the same time, he explains, universities and liberal arts education played a pivotal role in the ideological functioning of postwar capitalist society. But in the new asset-based economy, the aims of the liberal arts university are obsolete, from the point of view of large sectors of the capitalist class.
In this context, Baker explains, the university’s hegemonic functions for bourgeois society are less important. “The crude and ruthless, in Bourdieu’s words, seems to serve today’s elites just fine,” Baker writes. Indeed, the modern university is characterized by hyper-exploited and precarious academic workers, an increase in academic policing, and disciplinary measures that are cheerleaded by the bipartisan regime, and a curriculum that is too “woke” for the Right. On the Left, meanwhile, activists have rightfully begun to question a curriculum that is all too often linked to the oppressive norms of capitalism.
At the root of the exploitative, authoritarian, and ideological characteristics of the modern university is the fact that universities are ultimately dominated by the interests of the capitalist class. Institutions of higher education, especially the elite universities, reproduce the dominant ideology while producing science, research, and knowledge in the interests of the capitalist class. Further, through the purchase of bonds and investments in Zionism, fossil fuels, and the military-industrial complex, universities often directly contribute to and help perpetuate a system of capitalist exploitation. And, of course, many universities, including publicly funded state universities, have adopted a business-like model of operating that includes increased tuition, draconian austerity measures, and the hyperexploitation of workers in a tiered labor system.
As a result of the recent movement in solidarity with Palestine, the contradictions of universities under capitalism are becoming more clear. At the same time, tensions are deepening between college administrators, who are subservient to the interests of Wall Street and the bipartisan imperialist regime, and a new generation of students and university workers who are increasingly anti-capitalist and anti-imperialist.
As the traditional university model faces exhaustion, the new student and worker movement in higher education has the opportunity to clearly articulate and fight for the type of university we want: one that defends the interests of the working class and oppressed.
The struggle for free, public universities — that are organized by and for the working class and the oppressed, where there is academic freedom and freedom of expression, where Marxism is not censored, and where knowledge is put in service of workers and oppressed sectors, also implies fighting in the here and now for basic democratic rights and against the current attacks that limit our ability to fight.
The “Golden Age” of Higher Education under Capitalism
The landscape of higher education in the United States has undergone a profound transformation over the past century. Originally, universities served as elite institutions, accessible only to a privileged few, as historian Ellen Schrecker explains in her book The Lost Promise. After World War II, however, when the GI Bill expanded access to higher education for millions of veterans, universities began to be seen as integral to the pursuit of the American dream, and a “passport to the middle class” in the height of postwar prosperity. For the U.S. regime, this professionalized workforce was key to producing cadre for its project of economic expansion at home and abroad.
But this kind of education was not equally accessible to all. While many Black Americans served in World War II, the GI Bill exacerbated racial disparities in education. Under segregationist policies, most Southern colleges excluded Black students, while in the North, Black student enrollment was kept purposefully low. Historically Black Colleges received significantly less funding and could not admit all Black students.
The postwar education system was shaped by the Cold War, in which the strategic competition with the Soviet Union was at the center of the national political agenda. This competition required innovations in the realm of science and technology, as well as a newly educated workforce for the industrial era of the postwar boom. Eisenhower’s 1958 National Defense Education Act provided low-interest loans to students in defense-related fields of study. But it wasn’t just the sciences: language-area studies were also framed as a way to combat communist influence and culture, while also producing skilled and fluent employees for the burgeoning intelligence sector.
Universities were also on the forefront of McCarthyist attacks: “administering anti-communist loyalty oaths, banning politically controversial speakers, and, most regrettably, purging their ranks of politically tainted faculty members,” as Schrecker explains. From the late 1940s to early 1950s, over 100 academics were fired in a coordinated campaign led by the regime’s apparatuses, like the FBI. The state exerted influence over academia in very explicit ways — leading congressional witch hunts that threatened firings and social excommunications — but it also used the softer pressures of reputational damage, blocking research or professional advancements, and chilling free expression by faculty. In this way, the U.S. ensured that its universities would continue to serve the interests of imperialism during the Cold War.
The 1960s and 1970s marked another pivotal moment in the evolution of higher education. As the postwar compromise began to strain and crumble, the universities were swept up in the era’s social upheavals. Enrollment in universities nearly tripled during this time; mass universities emerged, with more heterogeneous student bodies. The trend toward including students of color in the university was strengthened with the passage of affirmative action programs in the 1960s. Black enrollment in college nearly doubled from 1960 to 1980.
An ideology developed around the idea that education is the solution to all social ills and that it can eradicate poverty by developing human beings into more valuable human capital. This is precisely the ideology that Samuel Bowles and Herbert Gintis criticize in Schooling in Capitalist America. But it is on this foundation that President Lyndon Johnson passed the so-called Great Society programs, which “saw the start of individualist, even consumerist, federal support for public higher education, which comes from tuition subsidies for students, not direct funding for universities,” as the authors of Lend and Rule argue.
Simultaneously, this era was marked by the emergence of a student movement that grew out of the civil rights movement, and became its most combative during the movement against the war in Vietnam. In many ways, this movement was set off by the massacre at Kent State University and, just 11 days later, the killings at Jackson State University. Activists of this period demanded a university that was more than a means to individual success, but was by and for the most oppressed sectors of society. They called for the curriculum to be revolutionized, along with the university’s undemocratic structures.
In response to the massive student uprising in the 1960s and 1970s, universities made concessions to the movement. While many of students’ most radical demands were denied — like open admission, democratization of the university, and the adoption of a radical curriculum related to issues of oppression — other major shifts did occur. For example, by 1972, Black studies programs existed in over 1,000 campuses, and according to a report called Higher Education and the Black American, Black studies filled “a standard, if insecure, niche in the curriculum.” Women’s studies departments sprang up all over the country as well, and universities were forced to diversify their courses and faculty.
The Neoliberal University
By the late 20th century, however, the higher-education landscape began to shift again, influenced by the rise of neoliberal ideology and the adoption of market principles into higher education. Neoliberalism emerged at the end of the 1970s as a response to a crisis in the postwar economic order. In the neoliberal epoch, capitalists managed to find limited but real mechanisms for accumulation by reopening markets to capital in China and in the former Soviet bloc. In addition to finding new sectors of the working class to exploit, the capitalists, particularly in imperialist countries, led a wave of attacks to discipline their own working classes and guarantee even more surplus value from workers in the context of a crisis of capitalist accumulation. This took the form of privatizations, attacks on workers’ rights, and austerity measures. Trickle-down economics and low tax rates for the wealthy meant a vast increase in income disparities and, increasingly, a debt-based economy.
Universities were not exempt from these new pressures, setting them on a course of transformation from the institutions for the public good, as they were once widely seen, to the austerity-battered, admin-heavy, overpriced degree mills we know today. One of the hallmarks of these kinds of universities is the shift from public to private funding sources and higher tuition that put the financial burden of attending a university on the student.
As Michael Fabricant and Stephen Brier explain in their book Austerity Blues, from 1990 to 2010, the real dollar value of per capita student funding per state at public institutions declined 2.3 percent. CUNY, the “People’s University,” saw a 40 percent drop in state funding per student from 1992 to 2012, and a 17 percent drop from 2018 to 2015 in real dollars.
Thanks to austerity measures and the lack of public funding, universities themselves have also taken on debt. As Lend and Rule highlights, long-term debt held by public institutions increased by 482 percent from 1989 to 2021. Their institutional debt creates a profit for banks and financial capital, leveraged by the promise to increase student tuition whenever needed. In this sense, public universities are, increasingly, a myth: they are not publicly funded by taxes but by debt, taken on by both the institution and the students.
Private universities are even more cozy with financial and corporate funders, growing their endowments through a proliferation of private equity investments. Elite universities like Brown have as much as 43 percent of its endowment allocated to a portfolio that includes investments in fossil fuel companies and industries linked to Zionist interests.
The links to private industry became even more pronounced under neoliberalism with legislation like the Bayh-Dole Act of 1980. This act incentivized universities to patent discoveries and profit from research. As a result, research agendas were increasingly shaped by corporate interests, aligning academic programs with the needs of industry rather than the needs of society.
Throughout most of the neoliberal period, university enrollment continued to increase. From 1980 to 2010 — the height of university enrollments — the number of enrolled college students went from 12 million to 21 million. Since 2010, university enrollment has dropped 11 percent, but it remains well above 1980 levels. “As enrollments increase,” Fabricant and Brier explain, “especially among students of color, an increasingly stratified hierarchy of separate and unequal tiers has grown within 4 year colleges and senior and community colleges.” This stratification means that the “value” of having a college degree has depreciated.
Working class and poor students of color disproportionately carry the burden of debt to attend college, a type of “predatory inclusion,” “a process where by members of a marginalized group are provided with access to a good, service or opportunity from which they have been historically excluded, but under conditions that jeopardized the benefits of that access.” In other words, “inclusion” offers only limited benefits for marginalized groups, but it provides significant benefits for the capitalist class, which profits off that inclusion.
Further, there is evidence that debt was used to discipline the student movement, especially in California, where then governor Ronald Reagan raised tuition at the UCs to punish students for their activism. He went on to impose this all over the country once he became president, doing so with bipartisan support. This is precisely what Milton Friedman, doyen of the Chicago school, had proposed just a few years before.
Another key aspect of the neoliberal university is that it relies on highly precarized adjunct labor. Previously, about three-quarters of postsecondary teachers worked on the tenure track, but as universities have expanded, they increasingly rely on adjunct faculty and graduate students — part-time instructors who typically receive lower wages and fewer benefits than their tenured counterparts. Most professors are no longer tenure tracked and have no hope for job security and higher wages. At public universities, adjuncts grew by more than 300 percent from 1975 to 2011; by 2014, they represented three-quarters of the workforce at public universities nationally.
Alongside the adjunctification of labor, administrative positions at colleges and universities grew 10 times faster than tenured-faculty positions, according to Department of Education data. This reflected an expansion of university bureaucracy as part of the university’s shifting focus to administrative efficiency and corporate-like governance. In other words, universities have become more bureaucratized as a way to siphon “power away from instructors and researchers,” as a recent article in the Atlantic noted.
The sciences at universities have increased their ties to the military-industrial complex, and the structure of grantmaking creates competition among coworkers, pitting professors and lab scientists against each other and often leading to the hyperexploitation of grad students working in labs.
But neoliberalism was more than just economic policies; it came along with an ideology that was, according to Perry Anderson, one of the most successful ideologies in the history of the world. Under this ideology, capitalism stood triumphant and without any alternatives. Universities played a central role in perpetuating this idea.
While the Democratic and Republican Parties were a duopoly of neoliberalism, the Republicans represented a reactionary neoliberalism that rejected the cultural shifts that resulted from the movements of the 1960s and 1970s; anti-feminist and anti-queer, it harkened back to “traditional family values.” On the other hand, the Democrats came to represent progressive neoliberalism. As Nancy Fraser explains, progressive neoliberalism is
an alliance of mainstream currents of new social movements (feminism, anti-racism, multiculturalism, and LGBTQ rights), on the one side, and high-end “symbolic” and service-based business sectors (Wall Street, Silicon Valley, and Hollywood), on the other. In this alliance, progressive forces are effectively joined with the forces of cognitive capitalism, especially financialization. However, unwittingly, the former lend their charisma to the latter. Ideals like diversity and empowerment, which could in principle serve different ends, now gloss policies that have devastated manufacturing and what were once middle-class lives. … Identifying “progress” with meritocracy instead of equality, these terms equated “emancipation” with the rise of a small elite of “talented” women, minorities, and gays in the winner-takes-all corporate hierarchy instead of with the latter’s abolition.
And the university was tasked with churning out a slightly more diverse elite to govern an increasingly unequal society. As Jodi Melamed argues in Represent and Destroy, “Knowledge about minoritized difference — especially racial and cultural difference — was made to work for post Keynesian social and economic policies. To this end, U.S. universities used their capacity to adapt and produce knowledges symptomatic of and productive for the new circumstances of the 1980s and 1990s.” In this context, as Malamed explains, “an essential function of the academy … was to manage minoritized difference — to run difference through its machinery of validation, certification and legibility to generate forms that augmented, enhanced and developed hegemony rather than disrupted it.” In other words, under neoliberalism, the university was made to justify the increasing race and class stratifications while incorporating students of color into the neoliberal university under the guise of “merit-based” admissions.
The university became a bastion of progressive neoliberalism, which is usually linked to the interests of the Democratic Party, since it feeds a pipeline of workers for the nonprofit industrial complex, supporters of Democratic politicians, and builds an ideology that connects progressive politics to voting for Democrats. It is no wonder that today, one of the biggest divides in politics is between college-educated people who vote Democrat and non-college-educated people (especially non-college-educated white people) who vote Republican. Other universities or even specific departments are bastions of the neoliberal, hawkish Republican Party, creating a steady stream of workers into the military-industrial complex as well as into the Republican Party. In both cases, however, students are taught to accept capitalism as the best way to organize the economy.
As a result, during the height of the neoliberal offensive, there was a proliferation of anti-Marxist ideas in the university, and they became essentially hegemonic even among more progressive sectors. As Terry Eagleton explains in The Illusions of Postmodernism, dominant ideologies of postmodernism, postcolonialism, and identity politics all in their own ways erased the working class as the strategic subject for overthrowing capitalism, denying the possibility, desirability, or general framework for such a goal. Marxism as a revolutionary weapon for class struggle was thrown away as anachronistic or dismissed as perpetuating the myth that it was class reductionist and economistic. Thus, the university acquired a haughty, “transgressive” veneer while upholding the capitalist system.
While the neoliberal university included more people in higher education than ever before in U.S. history, that inclusion did not mean equalizing the social hierarchy; rather, neoliberalism made the rich richer and the poor poorer while promoting the ideology of schools as the great equalizer. The neoliberal university made the university not only an instrument of hegemony for the capitalist class, but also a source of profit, whether by debt, investments, privatization, or adjunctification.
The Crisis of the Neoliberal University
The 2008 economic crisis opened up broader questioning of capitalism and its institutions, including the universities. This marked a crisis of neoliberalism more broadly and has expressed itself politically through a crisis of traditional parties and the emergence of left- and right-wing populisms. The crisis of progressive neoliberalism has also meant a crisis for the university, its bastion, whose administrations had promoted a type of neoliberal consensus, or “extreme center,” as Tariq Ali calls it. Now we can see more divisions both at the top and at the bottom within universities as well.
For example, both students and workers can see that universities’ former ideals are matched with the reality of significant debt for degrees, debt that may not provide a clear path to employment, or at best pitiful wages from adjunct labor that forces professors to live out of their cars. And as the revitalized student movement has shown, student activists now also face outright repression in the face of genocide.
The veil is being lifted even among broader sectors as universities face a crisis of prestige. As Barker notes, only 19 percent of Republicans expressed at least “quite a lot” of confidence in higher education — and for Democrats, it is down to 59 percent. Only 47 percent of college graduates had more than “some” confidence in the university.
As part of the broader crisis of neoliberalism, we’ve seen less ideological consensus when it comes to the commonsense ideas of neoliberalism and more polarization. For the Far Right, which views the disappointments of neoliberal capitalism as a problem of “cultural Marxism,” universities and schools have taken center stage for their reactionary attacks. In a speech to the National Conservatism Conference, J. D. Vance recently proclaimed, “The professors are the enemy.” These kinds of culture war attacks on universities were strengthened after the Black Lives Matter movement and have continued to do so amid the movement for Palestine. This has resulted in policies such as Florida governor Ron DeSantis’s attacks on LGBTQ studies, Black studies, and diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) programs.
Most recently, the movement for Palestine has profoundly challenged the neoliberal university — testing the limits of its “progressive” veneer. This has meant a McCarthyist attack on free speech at the university, impacting both student and worker protesters for Palestine. In fact Columbia University, the center of the university protests, came in last in annual college free speech rankings by Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression.
At the same time, the movement for Palestine is questioning many pillars of the neoliberal university: first and foremost university investments in Israel, but also cops on campus and, in some institutions, speaking about the need for free, public universities. Even before the movement for Palestine, which marked a significant leap in the radicalization of the U.S. student movement, we could see shifts in the ideological questioning of the status quo at universities with the outgrowth of the #MeToo movement in universities and a profound questioning of the rampant reproduction of patriarchal norms affecting both students and workers at universities.
In addition to the student movement, the labor movement in higher education has also been showing its potential to organize itself and go on the offensive. This was evidenced most recently by the UC workers strike and the CUNY rank and file assembly during the encampment movement. There was also the New School strike of 2022, which was the longest adjunct strike in U.S. history — during which students showed solidarity with workers and organized an occupation.
Alongside these actions, there has also been a movement to unionize at universities amid a general shift to a more favorable view of unions across the country. While the unionization rate has held steady or fallen in recent years, unionization rates at universities have skyrocketed. A recent report revealed a 133 percent increase in unionizations among graduate student employees in the U.S. since 2012.
Against this backdrop of growing tensions from the student and labor movement on one side and an increasingly active Far Right, which has the backing of sectors of capital, it’s clear that the neoliberal university is facing a crisis of sustainability. This is most evident in the recent ousting of Columbia president Minouche Shafik, who brutally repressed Columbia students, but not soon enough or rigorously enough for the Zionists on her board, who ousted her over the summer. Shafik’s resignation is a key example that the center cannot hold.
The convergence of rising costs, political attacks, working class and student activism, and the suppression of dissent points to the contradictions of the neoliberal university’s model, which is ultimately driven by the needs of capitalist greed and imperialist oppression. What is the alternative model of universities that can genuinely serve the interests of working class and oppressed people here and around the world?
Universities for the Working Class and Oppressed
As Bowles and Gintis have highlighted, schools are not only a space to create hegemony for the state, but also a space to create the rebels who will question it all. That is happening right before our eyes. The movement for Palestine opened a period of intensified crisis for the neoliberal university, which has meant the formation of a revitalized repressive apparatus at the university, and the erosion of some of the academic freedoms and democratic rights that were won out of the struggles of the 1960s and 1970s. The bipartisan regime, hand in hand with the university bureaucracy, is seeking to impose a new relation of force at the university.
It is essential that the Palestine movement and our unions stand up to fight this wave of repression, defending our right to protest, to speak up in solidarity with Palestine, and for academic freedom. It is essential that more professors join the struggle, including tenured faculty, whose academic freedoms are also being curtailed. Our struggle for Palestine and for the university must be organized from the bottom, in democratic assemblies where university workers and students can discuss and decide next steps democratically. We are seeing mass assemblies that model this in the movement of student occupations in Argentina; this type of mass self-organization can strengthen the movement for Palestine and the movement for the universities we need and deserve. We should fight for the right to unionize workers across universities, for coordinating committees with the surrounding communities, and for student committees in solidarity with workers’ struggles across the country.
We have the potential to recover both the combative traditions of the student and labor movement in this country and harness the power of students and workers across the country, who are increasingly seeing the limits of universities under capitalism. In this framework, it is strategically key for the student movement to unite with workers, both inside and outside universities, especially in strategic sectors where workers have the power to shut down society. We are inspired by the great examples of student-worker unity throughout history, including the French May, when students and workers built barricades, formed a general strike, and were poised to overthrow the president of France. In that sense, student-worker unity is a strategic question in the fight for our common struggles as working class and oppressed people. We got a small taste of the possibility of a workers’ and peoples’ university during the encampments but we don’t want just the margins of the university, but the whole thing.
But, while we defend our democratic rights at the university, we also fight for a different kind of university — a university that does not serve capital but the working class and oppressed. One that does not function like a business, run by university presidents with exorbitant salaries, but that is run by and for students, faculty, staff, and the community.
Universities must be free and public for all; private universities must be nationalized and made public. All universities must be free and fully funded by progressive taxes on the wealthiest. Being a full-time student should not be a privilege for students who can afford it: it should be a right of all students, who should get stipends that are equivalent to a real living wage to dedicate their time to study so that no one drops out of college due to lack of funds.
This means an end to all student debt, including forgiveness of all student debt held by millions of people around the country. Having the chance to study and produce knowledge should be a right afforded to the entire working class; it should not be a profit-making enterprise for finance capital.
We must also fight against the precarization of university workers. We should demand an end to tiered labor, in which adjuncts teach the majority of classes but are not paid a living wage: every professor should have access to full-time employment and benefits.
We should demand that our universities be fully funded to meet the needs of students and researchers, restoring the dilapidated infrastructure at public universities such as CUNY, which pales in comparison to the facilities at expensive and private universities.
We should get the cops off campus. They do not keep us safe, but harass Black and Brown students, as well as all movements for social justice. We should demand that the military stop recruiting on our campuses, in the spirit of the Vietnam War protests that fought to kick the ROTC off campus. We should demand that our job fairs not bring in the military-industrial complex, recruiting our students to do violence in working class neighborhoods or in semicolonial countries. And we demand an end to outside military funding for science and research — science and research should be publicly funded, not by corporations and much less the military.
The presidents and higher-ups of our universities have shown themselves to be the enemies of students and faculty; they send police to beat and arrest students. They evict students within days of their arrival on campus. We must demand a different kind of university: one organized democratically at the rank and file, with democratic decision-making. Students and workers are the ones who make universities run and should be the ones who make decisions.
Rather than shape curriculum and research agendas around the needs of capitalist imperialism, we can leverage advances in technology, science, and culture at the service of the masses. This could even include leveraging the specialized knowledge of economic planning to be put into use for the planning of a socialist society. With a looming environmental crisis, wars around the world, and the potential for more health crises like the pandemic, we need a university that addresses the critical issues that affect the working class and oppressed people: science that addresses climate change, that researches trans medical issues, or that seeks to study and preserve indigenous languages.
In that spirit, a university of and for the working class and community would include students and faculty of color beyond tokenism as a justification for racist and imperialist policies. Rather, the university would address the issues affecting oppressed people: research centers that create solutions for the problems created by structural racism, sexism, homophobia, and transphobia. Against the right-wing distortions of Marxism, we demand a university that includes and studies leftist thought and ideas, posing the foundations and roots of the complete rot that is capitalism and strategies for the way out. For us, this is the study of Marx, as well as the contributions of Rosa Luxemburg, Lenin, Trotsky, Gramsci, Mariátegui, C L R. James, and others. For us, Marxism presents not only a theory and explanation of class society but a practical guide for transforming society and liberating humanity.
Ultimately, universities should be institutions where we can reflect on how, together, we can build a society free from exploitation and oppression. But they are also important sites of struggle.
Amid a revitalized student movement and reactivated labor movement in the heart of imperialism and in other countries around the world, students and workers have the opportunity to not only “interpret the world,” as Marx famously said, but also to “change it.”
Maryam Alaniz is a socialist journalist, activist and PhD student living in New York City. She is an editor for the international section of Left Voice. Follow her on Twitter: @MaryamAlaniz
This past year in the U.S., a new chapter in class struggle has been written. Students, many from the Palestinian diaspora, anti-Zionist Jewish people, leftists, and people of conscience of all stripes have stood up against the genocide in Gaza. They have built encampments and questioned universities that run like businesses with investments in Israel. They have faced off the repression of university administrators while unmasking the imperialist character of both the Democrats and Republicans in office who help to send the police to beat up students and workers.
Broader sectors of U.S. society have also witnessed the unprecedented curtailing of democratic rights and the rise of a 21st-century McCarthyist witch hunt. Led by the Far Right, these anti-democratic attacks are supported by the broader regime, targeting anyone who dares to speak out against the genocide in institutions that are technically supposed to be bastions of free speech and academic freedom. These attacks have led professors and community members to defend basic democratic rights as the student movement came under attack this past year.
These conflicts have erupted in a specific context: the neoliberalization of universities. For years, government officials and university administrators have drastically cut university budgets, resulting in layoffs, the elimination of entire departments, and the increased adjunctification of university professors. After years of passivity, academic workers have been fighting back against precarious conditions with increased unionization and strikes at universities.
Universities carry an important weight in U.S. society and the economy. After all, they are where over 18 million people study and 4 million people work. But on a deeper level, recent events have opened up debate and discussion over the role of universities — from the historic revitalization of a student movement that challenges imperialism, to the right-wing culture wars in which universities and schools have become ground zero for unprecedented draconian measures.
Erik Baker, an activist within the Harvard Academic Workers union and a professor at Harvard, recently elaborated on the delegitimization of U.S. universities. As he points out in his essay, universities were once the kind of institution that fostered postwar ideals, like democratic engagement and cultural enrichment. At the same time, he explains, universities and liberal arts education played a pivotal role in the ideological functioning of postwar capitalist society. But in the new asset-based economy, the aims of the liberal arts university are obsolete, from the point of view of large sectors of the capitalist class.
In this context, Baker explains, the university’s hegemonic functions for bourgeois society are less important. “The crude and ruthless, in Bourdieu’s words, seems to serve today’s elites just fine,” Baker writes. Indeed, the modern university is characterized by hyper-exploited and precarious academic workers, an increase in academic policing, and disciplinary measures that are cheerleaded by the bipartisan regime, and a curriculum that is too “woke” for the Right. On the Left, meanwhile, activists have rightfully begun to question a curriculum that is all too often linked to the oppressive norms of capitalism.
At the root of the exploitative, authoritarian, and ideological characteristics of the modern university is the fact that universities are ultimately dominated by the interests of the capitalist class. Institutions of higher education, especially the elite universities, reproduce the dominant ideology while producing science, research, and knowledge in the interests of the capitalist class. Further, through the purchase of bonds and investments in Zionism, fossil fuels, and the military-industrial complex, universities often directly contribute to and help perpetuate a system of capitalist exploitation. And, of course, many universities, including publicly funded state universities, have adopted a business-like model of operating that includes increased tuition, draconian austerity measures, and the hyperexploitation of workers in a tiered labor system.
As a result of the recent movement in solidarity with Palestine, the contradictions of universities under capitalism are becoming more clear. At the same time, tensions are deepening between college administrators, who are subservient to the interests of Wall Street and the bipartisan imperialist regime, and a new generation of students and university workers who are increasingly anti-capitalist and anti-imperialist.
As the traditional university model faces exhaustion, the new student and worker movement in higher education has the opportunity to clearly articulate and fight for the type of university we want: one that defends the interests of the working class and oppressed.
The struggle for free, public universities — that are organized by and for the working class and the oppressed, where there is academic freedom and freedom of expression, where Marxism is not censored, and where knowledge is put in service of workers and oppressed sectors, also implies fighting in the here and now for basic democratic rights and against the current attacks that limit our ability to fight.
The “Golden Age” of Higher Education under Capitalism
The landscape of higher education in the United States has undergone a profound transformation over the past century. Originally, universities served as elite institutions, accessible only to a privileged few, as historian Ellen Schrecker explains in her book The Lost Promise. After World War II, however, when the GI Bill expanded access to higher education for millions of veterans, universities began to be seen as integral to the pursuit of the American dream, and a “passport to the middle class” in the height of postwar prosperity. For the U.S. regime, this professionalized workforce was key to producing cadre for its project of economic expansion at home and abroad.
But this kind of education was not equally accessible to all. While many Black Americans served in World War II, the GI Bill exacerbated racial disparities in education. Under segregationist policies, most Southern colleges excluded Black students, while in the North, Black student enrollment was kept purposefully low. Historically Black Colleges received significantly less funding and could not admit all Black students.
The postwar education system was shaped by the Cold War, in which the strategic competition with the Soviet Union was at the center of the national political agenda. This competition required innovations in the realm of science and technology, as well as a newly educated workforce for the industrial era of the postwar boom. Eisenhower’s 1958 National Defense Education Act provided low-interest loans to students in defense-related fields of study. But it wasn’t just the sciences: language-area studies were also framed as a way to combat communist influence and culture, while also producing skilled and fluent employees for the burgeoning intelligence sector.
Universities were also on the forefront of McCarthyist attacks: “administering anti-communist loyalty oaths, banning politically controversial speakers, and, most regrettably, purging their ranks of politically tainted faculty members,” as Schrecker explains. From the late 1940s to early 1950s, over 100 academics were fired in a coordinated campaign led by the regime’s apparatuses, like the FBI. The state exerted influence over academia in very explicit ways — leading congressional witch hunts that threatened firings and social excommunications — but it also used the softer pressures of reputational damage, blocking research or professional advancements, and chilling free expression by faculty. In this way, the U.S. ensured that its universities would continue to serve the interests of imperialism during the Cold War.
The 1960s and 1970s marked another pivotal moment in the evolution of higher education. As the postwar compromise began to strain and crumble, the universities were swept up in the era’s social upheavals. Enrollment in universities nearly tripled during this time; mass universities emerged, with more heterogeneous student bodies. The trend toward including students of color in the university was strengthened with the passage of affirmative action programs in the 1960s. Black enrollment in college nearly doubled from 1960 to 1980.
An ideology developed around the idea that education is the solution to all social ills and that it can eradicate poverty by developing human beings into more valuable human capital. This is precisely the ideology that Samuel Bowles and Herbert Gintis criticize in Schooling in Capitalist America. But it is on this foundation that President Lyndon Johnson passed the so-called Great Society programs, which “saw the start of individualist, even consumerist, federal support for public higher education, which comes from tuition subsidies for students, not direct funding for universities,” as the authors of Lend and Rule argue.
Simultaneously, this era was marked by the emergence of a student movement that grew out of the civil rights movement, and became its most combative during the movement against the war in Vietnam. In many ways, this movement was set off by the massacre at Kent State University and, just 11 days later, the killings at Jackson State University. Activists of this period demanded a university that was more than a means to individual success, but was by and for the most oppressed sectors of society. They called for the curriculum to be revolutionized, along with the university’s undemocratic structures.
In response to the massive student uprising in the 1960s and 1970s, universities made concessions to the movement. While many of students’ most radical demands were denied — like open admission, democratization of the university, and the adoption of a radical curriculum related to issues of oppression — other major shifts did occur. For example, by 1972, Black studies programs existed in over 1,000 campuses, and according to a report called Higher Education and the Black American, Black studies filled “a standard, if insecure, niche in the curriculum.” Women’s studies departments sprang up all over the country as well, and universities were forced to diversify their courses and faculty.
The Neoliberal University
By the late 20th century, however, the higher-education landscape began to shift again, influenced by the rise of neoliberal ideology and the adoption of market principles into higher education. Neoliberalism emerged at the end of the 1970s as a response to a crisis in the postwar economic order. In the neoliberal epoch, capitalists managed to find limited but real mechanisms for accumulation by reopening markets to capital in China and in the former Soviet bloc. In addition to finding new sectors of the working class to exploit, the capitalists, particularly in imperialist countries, led a wave of attacks to discipline their own working classes and guarantee even more surplus value from workers in the context of a crisis of capitalist accumulation. This took the form of privatizations, attacks on workers’ rights, and austerity measures. Trickle-down economics and low tax rates for the wealthy meant a vast increase in income disparities and, increasingly, a debt-based economy.
Universities were not exempt from these new pressures, setting them on a course of transformation from the institutions for the public good, as they were once widely seen, to the austerity-battered, admin-heavy, overpriced degree mills we know today. One of the hallmarks of these kinds of universities is the shift from public to private funding sources and higher tuition that put the financial burden of attending a university on the student.
As Michael Fabricant and Stephen Brier explain in their book Austerity Blues, from 1990 to 2010, the real dollar value of per capita student funding per state at public institutions declined 2.3 percent. CUNY, the “People’s University,” saw a 40 percent drop in state funding per student from 1992 to 2012, and a 17 percent drop from 2018 to 2015 in real dollars.
Thanks to austerity measures and the lack of public funding, universities themselves have also taken on debt. As Lend and Rule highlights, long-term debt held by public institutions increased by 482 percent from 1989 to 2021. Their institutional debt creates a profit for banks and financial capital, leveraged by the promise to increase student tuition whenever needed. In this sense, public universities are, increasingly, a myth: they are not publicly funded by taxes but by debt, taken on by both the institution and the students.
Private universities are even more cozy with financial and corporate funders, growing their endowments through a proliferation of private equity investments. Elite universities like Brown have as much as 43 percent of its endowment allocated to a portfolio that includes investments in fossil fuel companies and industries linked to Zionist interests.
The links to private industry became even more pronounced under neoliberalism with legislation like the Bayh-Dole Act of 1980. This act incentivized universities to patent discoveries and profit from research. As a result, research agendas were increasingly shaped by corporate interests, aligning academic programs with the needs of industry rather than the needs of society.
Throughout most of the neoliberal period, university enrollment continued to increase. From 1980 to 2010 — the height of university enrollments — the number of enrolled college students went from 12 million to 21 million. Since 2010, university enrollment has dropped 11 percent, but it remains well above 1980 levels. “As enrollments increase,” Fabricant and Brier explain, “especially among students of color, an increasingly stratified hierarchy of separate and unequal tiers has grown within 4 year colleges and senior and community colleges.” This stratification means that the “value” of having a college degree has depreciated.
Working class and poor students of color disproportionately carry the burden of debt to attend college, a type of “predatory inclusion,” “a process where by members of a marginalized group are provided with access to a good, service or opportunity from which they have been historically excluded, but under conditions that jeopardized the benefits of that access.” In other words, “inclusion” offers only limited benefits for marginalized groups, but it provides significant benefits for the capitalist class, which profits off that inclusion.
Further, there is evidence that debt was used to discipline the student movement, especially in California, where then governor Ronald Reagan raised tuition at the UCs to punish students for their activism. He went on to impose this all over the country once he became president, doing so with bipartisan support. This is precisely what Milton Friedman, doyen of the Chicago school, had proposed just a few years before.
Another key aspect of the neoliberal university is that it relies on highly precarized adjunct labor. Previously, about three-quarters of postsecondary teachers worked on the tenure track, but as universities have expanded, they increasingly rely on adjunct faculty and graduate students — part-time instructors who typically receive lower wages and fewer benefits than their tenured counterparts. Most professors are no longer tenure tracked and have no hope for job security and higher wages. At public universities, adjuncts grew by more than 300 percent from 1975 to 2011; by 2014, they represented three-quarters of the workforce at public universities nationally.
Alongside the adjunctification of labor, administrative positions at colleges and universities grew 10 times faster than tenured-faculty positions, according to Department of Education data. This reflected an expansion of university bureaucracy as part of the university’s shifting focus to administrative efficiency and corporate-like governance. In other words, universities have become more bureaucratized as a way to siphon “power away from instructors and researchers,” as a recent article in the Atlantic noted.
The sciences at universities have increased their ties to the military-industrial complex, and the structure of grantmaking creates competition among coworkers, pitting professors and lab scientists against each other and often leading to the hyperexploitation of grad students working in labs.
But neoliberalism was more than just economic policies; it came along with an ideology that was, according to Perry Anderson, one of the most successful ideologies in the history of the world. Under this ideology, capitalism stood triumphant and without any alternatives. Universities played a central role in perpetuating this idea.
While the Democratic and Republican Parties were a duopoly of neoliberalism, the Republicans represented a reactionary neoliberalism that rejected the cultural shifts that resulted from the movements of the 1960s and 1970s; anti-feminist and anti-queer, it harkened back to “traditional family values.” On the other hand, the Democrats came to represent progressive neoliberalism. As Nancy Fraser explains, progressive neoliberalism is
an alliance of mainstream currents of new social movements (feminism, anti-racism, multiculturalism, and LGBTQ rights), on the one side, and high-end “symbolic” and service-based business sectors (Wall Street, Silicon Valley, and Hollywood), on the other. In this alliance, progressive forces are effectively joined with the forces of cognitive capitalism, especially financialization. However, unwittingly, the former lend their charisma to the latter. Ideals like diversity and empowerment, which could in principle serve different ends, now gloss policies that have devastated manufacturing and what were once middle-class lives. … Identifying “progress” with meritocracy instead of equality, these terms equated “emancipation” with the rise of a small elite of “talented” women, minorities, and gays in the winner-takes-all corporate hierarchy instead of with the latter’s abolition.
And the university was tasked with churning out a slightly more diverse elite to govern an increasingly unequal society. As Jodi Melamed argues in Represent and Destroy, “Knowledge about minoritized difference — especially racial and cultural difference — was made to work for post Keynesian social and economic policies. To this end, U.S. universities used their capacity to adapt and produce knowledges symptomatic of and productive for the new circumstances of the 1980s and 1990s.” In this context, as Malamed explains, “an essential function of the academy … was to manage minoritized difference — to run difference through its machinery of validation, certification and legibility to generate forms that augmented, enhanced and developed hegemony rather than disrupted it.” In other words, under neoliberalism, the university was made to justify the increasing race and class stratifications while incorporating students of color into the neoliberal university under the guise of “merit-based” admissions.
The university became a bastion of progressive neoliberalism, which is usually linked to the interests of the Democratic Party, since it feeds a pipeline of workers for the nonprofit industrial complex, supporters of Democratic politicians, and builds an ideology that connects progressive politics to voting for Democrats. It is no wonder that today, one of the biggest divides in politics is between college-educated people who vote Democrat and non-college-educated people (especially non-college-educated white people) who vote Republican. Other universities or even specific departments are bastions of the neoliberal, hawkish Republican Party, creating a steady stream of workers into the military-industrial complex as well as into the Republican Party. In both cases, however, students are taught to accept capitalism as the best way to organize the economy.
As a result, during the height of the neoliberal offensive, there was a proliferation of anti-Marxist ideas in the university, and they became essentially hegemonic even among more progressive sectors. As Terry Eagleton explains in The Illusions of Postmodernism, dominant ideologies of postmodernism, postcolonialism, and identity politics all in their own ways erased the working class as the strategic subject for overthrowing capitalism, denying the possibility, desirability, or general framework for such a goal. Marxism as a revolutionary weapon for class struggle was thrown away as anachronistic or dismissed as perpetuating the myth that it was class reductionist and economistic. Thus, the university acquired a haughty, “transgressive” veneer while upholding the capitalist system.
While the neoliberal university included more people in higher education than ever before in U.S. history, that inclusion did not mean equalizing the social hierarchy; rather, neoliberalism made the rich richer and the poor poorer while promoting the ideology of schools as the great equalizer. The neoliberal university made the university not only an instrument of hegemony for the capitalist class, but also a source of profit, whether by debt, investments, privatization, or adjunctification.
The Crisis of the Neoliberal University
The 2008 economic crisis opened up broader questioning of capitalism and its institutions, including the universities. This marked a crisis of neoliberalism more broadly and has expressed itself politically through a crisis of traditional parties and the emergence of left- and right-wing populisms. The crisis of progressive neoliberalism has also meant a crisis for the university, its bastion, whose administrations had promoted a type of neoliberal consensus, or “extreme center,” as Tariq Ali calls it. Now we can see more divisions both at the top and at the bottom within universities as well.
For example, both students and workers can see that universities’ former ideals are matched with the reality of significant debt for degrees, debt that may not provide a clear path to employment, or at best pitiful wages from adjunct labor that forces professors to live out of their cars. And as the revitalized student movement has shown, student activists now also face outright repression in the face of genocide.
The veil is being lifted even among broader sectors as universities face a crisis of prestige. As Barker notes, only 19 percent of Republicans expressed at least “quite a lot” of confidence in higher education — and for Democrats, it is down to 59 percent. Only 47 percent of college graduates had more than “some” confidence in the university.
As part of the broader crisis of neoliberalism, we’ve seen less ideological consensus when it comes to the commonsense ideas of neoliberalism and more polarization. For the Far Right, which views the disappointments of neoliberal capitalism as a problem of “cultural Marxism,” universities and schools have taken center stage for their reactionary attacks. In a speech to the National Conservatism Conference, J. D. Vance recently proclaimed, “The professors are the enemy.” These kinds of culture war attacks on universities were strengthened after the Black Lives Matter movement and have continued to do so amid the movement for Palestine. This has resulted in policies such as Florida governor Ron DeSantis’s attacks on LGBTQ studies, Black studies, and diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) programs.
Most recently, the movement for Palestine has profoundly challenged the neoliberal university — testing the limits of its “progressive” veneer. This has meant a McCarthyist attack on free speech at the university, impacting both student and worker protesters for Palestine. In fact Columbia University, the center of the university protests, came in last in annual college free speech rankings by Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression.
At the same time, the movement for Palestine is questioning many pillars of the neoliberal university: first and foremost university investments in Israel, but also cops on campus and, in some institutions, speaking about the need for free, public universities. Even before the movement for Palestine, which marked a significant leap in the radicalization of the U.S. student movement, we could see shifts in the ideological questioning of the status quo at universities with the outgrowth of the #MeToo movement in universities and a profound questioning of the rampant reproduction of patriarchal norms affecting both students and workers at universities.
In addition to the student movement, the labor movement in higher education has also been showing its potential to organize itself and go on the offensive. This was evidenced most recently by the UC workers strike and the CUNY rank and file assembly during the encampment movement. There was also the New School strike of 2022, which was the longest adjunct strike in U.S. history — during which students showed solidarity with workers and organized an occupation.
Alongside these actions, there has also been a movement to unionize at universities amid a general shift to a more favorable view of unions across the country. While the unionization rate has held steady or fallen in recent years, unionization rates at universities have skyrocketed. A recent report revealed a 133 percent increase in unionizations among graduate student employees in the U.S. since 2012.
Against this backdrop of growing tensions from the student and labor movement on one side and an increasingly active Far Right, which has the backing of sectors of capital, it’s clear that the neoliberal university is facing a crisis of sustainability. This is most evident in the recent ousting of Columbia president Minouche Shafik, who brutally repressed Columbia students, but not soon enough or rigorously enough for the Zionists on her board, who ousted her over the summer. Shafik’s resignation is a key example that the center cannot hold.
The convergence of rising costs, political attacks, working class and student activism, and the suppression of dissent points to the contradictions of the neoliberal university’s model, which is ultimately driven by the needs of capitalist greed and imperialist oppression. What is the alternative model of universities that can genuinely serve the interests of working class and oppressed people here and around the world?
Universities for the Working Class and Oppressed
As Bowles and Gintis have highlighted, schools are not only a space to create hegemony for the state, but also a space to create the rebels who will question it all. That is happening right before our eyes. The movement for Palestine opened a period of intensified crisis for the neoliberal university, which has meant the formation of a revitalized repressive apparatus at the university, and the erosion of some of the academic freedoms and democratic rights that were won out of the struggles of the 1960s and 1970s. The bipartisan regime, hand in hand with the university bureaucracy, is seeking to impose a new relation of force at the university.
It is essential that the Palestine movement and our unions stand up to fight this wave of repression, defending our right to protest, to speak up in solidarity with Palestine, and for academic freedom. It is essential that more professors join the struggle, including tenured faculty, whose academic freedoms are also being curtailed. Our struggle for Palestine and for the university must be organized from the bottom, in democratic assemblies where university workers and students can discuss and decide next steps democratically. We are seeing mass assemblies that model this in the movement of student occupations in Argentina; this type of mass self-organization can strengthen the movement for Palestine and the movement for the universities we need and deserve. We should fight for the right to unionize workers across universities, for coordinating committees with the surrounding communities, and for student committees in solidarity with workers’ struggles across the country.
We have the potential to recover both the combative traditions of the student and labor movement in this country and harness the power of students and workers across the country, who are increasingly seeing the limits of universities under capitalism. In this framework, it is strategically key for the student movement to unite with workers, both inside and outside universities, especially in strategic sectors where workers have the power to shut down society. We are inspired by the great examples of student-worker unity throughout history, including the French May, when students and workers built barricades, formed a general strike, and were poised to overthrow the president of France. In that sense, student-worker unity is a strategic question in the fight for our common struggles as working class and oppressed people. We got a small taste of the possibility of a workers’ and peoples’ university during the encampments but we don’t want just the margins of the university, but the whole thing.
But, while we defend our democratic rights at the university, we also fight for a different kind of university — a university that does not serve capital but the working class and oppressed. One that does not function like a business, run by university presidents with exorbitant salaries, but that is run by and for students, faculty, staff, and the community.
Universities must be free and public for all; private universities must be nationalized and made public. All universities must be free and fully funded by progressive taxes on the wealthiest. Being a full-time student should not be a privilege for students who can afford it: it should be a right of all students, who should get stipends that are equivalent to a real living wage to dedicate their time to study so that no one drops out of college due to lack of funds.
This means an end to all student debt, including forgiveness of all student debt held by millions of people around the country. Having the chance to study and produce knowledge should be a right afforded to the entire working class; it should not be a profit-making enterprise for finance capital.
We must also fight against the precarization of university workers. We should demand an end to tiered labor, in which adjuncts teach the majority of classes but are not paid a living wage: every professor should have access to full-time employment and benefits.
We should demand that our universities be fully funded to meet the needs of students and researchers, restoring the dilapidated infrastructure at public universities such as CUNY, which pales in comparison to the facilities at expensive and private universities.
We should get the cops off campus. They do not keep us safe, but harass Black and Brown students, as well as all movements for social justice. We should demand that the military stop recruiting on our campuses, in the spirit of the Vietnam War protests that fought to kick the ROTC off campus. We should demand that our job fairs not bring in the military-industrial complex, recruiting our students to do violence in working class neighborhoods or in semicolonial countries. And we demand an end to outside military funding for science and research — science and research should be publicly funded, not by corporations and much less the military.
The presidents and higher-ups of our universities have shown themselves to be the enemies of students and faculty; they send police to beat and arrest students. They evict students within days of their arrival on campus. We must demand a different kind of university: one organized democratically at the rank and file, with democratic decision-making. Students and workers are the ones who make universities run and should be the ones who make decisions.
Rather than shape curriculum and research agendas around the needs of capitalist imperialism, we can leverage advances in technology, science, and culture at the service of the masses. This could even include leveraging the specialized knowledge of economic planning to be put into use for the planning of a socialist society. With a looming environmental crisis, wars around the world, and the potential for more health crises like the pandemic, we need a university that addresses the critical issues that affect the working class and oppressed people: science that addresses climate change, that researches trans medical issues, or that seeks to study and preserve indigenous languages.
In that spirit, a university of and for the working class and community would include students and faculty of color beyond tokenism as a justification for racist and imperialist policies. Rather, the university would address the issues affecting oppressed people: research centers that create solutions for the problems created by structural racism, sexism, homophobia, and transphobia. Against the right-wing distortions of Marxism, we demand a university that includes and studies leftist thought and ideas, posing the foundations and roots of the complete rot that is capitalism and strategies for the way out. For us, this is the study of Marx, as well as the contributions of Rosa Luxemburg, Lenin, Trotsky, Gramsci, Mariátegui, C L R. James, and others. For us, Marxism presents not only a theory and explanation of class society but a practical guide for transforming society and liberating humanity.
Ultimately, universities should be institutions where we can reflect on how, together, we can build a society free from exploitation and oppression. But they are also important sites of struggle.
Amid a revitalized student movement and reactivated labor movement in the heart of imperialism and in other countries around the world, students and workers have the opportunity to not only “interpret the world,” as Marx famously said, but also to “change it.”
Maryam Alaniz is a socialist journalist, activist and PhD student living in New York City. She is an editor for the international section of Left Voice. Follow her on Twitter: @MaryamAlaniz
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