How Social Movements Can Win the Higher Ed Wars
Coalitions Fighting for the Common Good Are Key
Whether at the federal or state level, highly-exclusive and well-endowed colleges and universities are obstructing or watering down common sense reforms to benefit our most marginalized students. Regressive actors outside higher education are working to undermine it as a whole, painting all colleges and universities, but especially highly-exclusive institutions, as narrowly self-interested, self-absorbed, uncaring, ineffective, effete, and out-of-touch. These regressive actors need a foil to appeal to working class people, especially swing voters, so they obscure the benefits of college and exaggerate campus conflicts in order to cast a villain by contrast.
Highly-exclusive institutions and their state (MICUA in Md.) and federal (American Council on Education) lobbyists, however, seem intent on playing the part. Instead of mobilizing their immense resources to advance the interests of the majority of college students and research agendas for the common good, they play petty policy games and scrap for every last public dollar, despite enormous reserves of cash and social capital. Those fighting for the interests of working class students and enacting progressive action research agendas should realize they will find few institutional allies among highly-exclusive colleges and universities, who have built their brands and designed their operations with other priorities in mind.
That’s not to say there aren’t individual, departmental, or organizational allies at highly-exclusive colleges and universities who can and should be engaged in coalitional organizing. Faculty, student-facing staff, grad worker unions, students, and even the occasional administrator at these schools can and do play important roles in movements for social justice. But they are operating within institutions designed to enforce the most harmful forms of hierarchy; and so their movement contributions, in part, should be assessed based on their willingness to bite the hand that feeds them.
That’s also not to say folks at less exclusive colleges and universities are automatic allies. Snubbed by those in the supposed upper echelon of the sector, they are often just as attached to the trappings of status and hierarchy. The key here is making the case these schools and the people in them have more to gain by exiting the rankings rat race and making common cause with non-exclusive and open access institutions.
If we fail to build and continue to behave like crabs in a barrel, whose zero sum behavior benefits mid-level administrators trampolining from one school to the next but not our students and communities, regressive forces may well succeed. If we build strong coalitions across higher ed, and with high schools, labor, and other social justice movement forces, the future of higher education in the U.S. is bright indeed.
