While reading Austerity Blues this week, I came across a tweet by a CUNY PhD student. It read: “fight for CUNY students without reproducing neoliberal upward mobility narratives challenge.” I thought this tweet was both stimulating and, well, challenging to think about in relation to Brier and Fabricant’s work. When we talk about education, especially higher education, we are inevitably sidling up to narratives of socio-economic mobility and success. As Brier and Fabricant note, these narratives are mutable and can be manipulated to justify neoliberal modes of governance; austerity politics under Obama, for example, hitched notions of socio-economic advancement to quantitative metrics like graduation rates, a policy move that in turn abetted the gutting of the actual education students were receiving. This is a pretty clear-cut example of a “bad” mobilization of upward mobility narratives in the context of higher education, but I think other instances can be more ambiguous. On pg. 114, for example, Brier and Fabricant describe how public divestment has led to “the evisceration of the prospects of a college degree and, in turn, the dimming hope of entrée to the American Dream.” They do not clarify what they mean by the American Dream, or if they think the American Dream is attainable ever or just under the right conditions. “The American Dream” is a loaded term that has occasionally been used to justify or mask over egregious political projects, and I’m pointing out its usage in Austerity Blues not as some sort of “Aha gotcha!” moment, but to highlight how difficult it is to extricate discussions of education from certain promises of economic success. And like Brier and Fabricant, I do think economic mobility—if we define mobility as moving people into financial security and out of precarity—is important in the context of education’s exacerbation of a widening class divide. I do feel it is important that students can graduate quickly to avoid accumulating debt, that they are equipped with the practical skills they need to fend for themselves in an unforgiving job market—that students can, in certain ways, instrumentalize the education they receive. This is an attitude I identify in myself and feel ambivalent about precisely because I don’t want to buy into and subject higher education to neoliberal mobility narratives or market imperatives. But my instinct is to say that we need to pay attention to mobility if only because the lack of it so often contributes to placing vulnerable people before what Denise Ferreira da Silva calls “the horizon of death.” This seems like a tension that can’t really be resolved, especially because divestment and austerity is happening in all aspects of people’s lives—in the hollowing out of the welfare state, in the conflation of hiring with qualifying for health insurance, etc. Education thus becomes, very urgently, the space where people can at least attempt to move beyond precarity and material harm. This unfortunately overshadows a discussion of what else education can be for; Brier and Fabricant highlight their model of “emancipatory education” in the epilogue, for example, but I felt that didn’t really get sustained attention in the book itself.

Reading this after The Undercommons was interesting because Moten & Harney diverge from Fabricant & Brier in so many ways, even though they’re identifying a similar set of problems. Indeed, I appreciated Fabricant & Brier’s very concrete attitude towards what needs to be done to fix the mess we’re in (though I will admit I felt somewhat ambivalent about the extended conversation on/endorsement of faculty governance in the section on CUNY Pathways—which faculty are included here? How does faculty governance hold itself accountable to incorporating student perspectives?). Fabricant & Brier’s invocation of the GI Bill, post-war education funding and California’s Master Plan seemed to suggest that public education had once “worked”—not perfectly, but in a way that might function as a blueprint for what we should be demanding for the future. That differs a lot from Moten & Harney’s idea that one needs to tear the whole system down. In connection to this I couldn’t help but think of the way public universities like UVA were made possible through slavery as well as (something I had only too recently learned) the fact that the lands passed down via the Morrill Act had been stolen and expropriated from around 250 Native American tribes and communities. I think a discussion of public education needs to also grapple with its foundations and unpayable debts (to use a term from The Undercommons), because doing so not only works to redress intergenerational harm but also fundamentally destabilizes the way we are commonly forced to view education as a phase of the market. Is it possible instead to see education as part of a government’s responsibility to its people, a “bequest from one generation to the next”?

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