Reading The Undercommons is illuminating to me in ways that come with some caveats (some, not all, of which are expressed in Austerity Blues). Reading Austerity Blues is illuminating to me in ways that come with some caveats (some, not all, of which are expressed by The Undercommons).

I found myself attaching much less to Putting the Humanities to Work, even when I ostensibly agree with much of it, and I’m struggling to articulate why.

First, let me say, I am GLAD GC’s English department is (often seemingly) hospitable to students who want to pursue alternative paths or more creative assignments. I am truly glad about this, and I cannot emphasize how much different the overall culture seems to be here than in my previous institution. One of the most demoralizing moments at my last institution was when I said I was interested in pursuing a community college position and one of my advisors said, “Well, then why are you here? You don’t need a Ph.D. to do that.” I don’t think I would meet the same response here and, if I did, I don’t think it would be difficult to find support from people within the institution who assured me that that response was a bad response. I am thankful that, from what I’ve seen, people here seem to talk really openly about what they imagine for their futures and about their desires re: pursuing the degree. I think that this culture coincides with more honest and interesting intellectual work, for sure, if partially just because it allows for more honest human beings.

I think it’s a very PRACTICAL book insofar as it suggests some ways we could shift culturally to respond to a context where most people simply will not get tenure track, full-time faculty positions. I guess that just frustrates me because there are…plenty of academic positions! And I think I’d personally prefer a book about how people (especially full-time faculty) could fight the reliance on contingent labor. The end of the book has a list of things to do and questioning racism and sexism was kind of a point on a list instead of foundational to this system of contingency. Something I was missing from the book is just kind of like….How are we going to expect full-time faculty members who are not all but often (as Rogers notes) people with privileged backgrounds, consistently and effectively (as a group, not just as certain cool individuals) mentor people without those privileges? And then if a potential goal of mentorship is to mentor people toward non-faculty positions – does that not just reproduce and reinforce the same departmental hierarchies and demographics?

I also pause a bit at an assumption driving the book about how humanities students trained by Ph.D. programs would be especially suited to non-academic jobs. Is her point that they COULD be with widely different training, or that they are? There was one point where she mentioned that academics would need “no specific training” or “no specialized training” (these are paraphrases because I unfortunately didn’t write it down!) to mentor students toward less traditional careers but…is that true?? The beginning of my previous paragraph called the book “practical,” but I’m not sure if the huge cultural shifts within departments that she said should happen really could happen in meaningful, consistent ways across departments and institutions? It’s almost like the book argues for a cultural shift without being nearly as harsh (in my opinion) about some of the really destructive thinking and relational habits that also happen in and are nurtured by many Humanities departments.

I keep thinking I’m missing something. To be quite honest, it’s possible that the word “career” feels a little abstract at this moment in time! But yeah. Super interested to hear other people’s responses.

Dear All

So much to respond to below, and I look forward to our class meeting. Just to start out, a lot of people have referenced CUNY’s history of Open Admissions. I wanted to share a recent dissertation from our program:

Danica Savonick, Insurgent Knowledge: The Poetics and Pedagogy of Toni Cade Bambara, June Jordan, Audre Lorde, and Adrienne Rich in the Era of Open Admissions

This week’s reading of Austerity Blues provided detailed information on policies and reform that I had no knowledge of prior to the reading. Although the reading was easier to digest than The Undercommons, the book provided a lot of information to consume. The reading explores the timeline of public policy, technology and privatization that has affected public education. The book explains how politics influence our personal lives, especially how we navigate education, they write, “It was in the public university during that era where we learned that the external world of political economy and our own interior lives were inseparable. These worlds had to be linked to be understood. That struggle for unification has marked much of our academic work ever since” (2). The decade of the 1960s opened the door for students to protest and advocate for the many intersections of their identities. The emergence of the SNCC in conversation with The Black Panther Party, Civil Rights Movement and Anti-War Movements illustrated just how much “the external world of political economy” is a part of students “interior lives.” Carmen Kynard’s book, Vernacular Insurrections: Race, Black Protest, and the New Century in Composition-Literacies Studies, explores twenty-first-century literacies, specifically those created by Black liberation movements, and how they work to impact our personal lives and academic institutions. Kynard analyzes the link between our personal lives and education through the lens of discourse and language. How we maneuver academic institutions is influenced by politics of our identities. 

The reading explores how policy impacts our education system. It analyzes historical policies that once promoted free and/or accessible public education that has since been reformed to negatively impact students’ quality of education, they write, “Student per capita public spending in higher education, for example, has declined over the past fifteen years. The reduction of investment has in turn had a significant impact on the quality of education as class sizes increase, pedagogy is mechanized, and academic content is increasingly standardized or watered down. The social reproduction of college students from one generation to the next is less likely as a result to promote the kind of classroom work and faculty engagement that sharpen students’ critical thinking and writing skills. This shift in education quality also has negative consequences for many college graduates, who are increasingly unable to function as informed citizens and to take on challenging job roles” (16). The ways in which the country’s education policies have been reformed and spending defunded causes a number of harmful effects. For one, large class sizes reduce the number of students that are able to receive a nurturing education. Class sizes also affect the efficiency of teachers to execute a lesson plan that aids the many learning styles of students. The reduction of engagement tailored to “sharpen students’ critical thinking and writing skills” trickles down to negatively impact college students. How can students be expected to perform as well-learned individuals participating in society if our education system does not foster their responsibilities? Our country’s political and social system is more concerned with tackling issues of crime and punishment rather than preventative measures. If more money was used to aid preventing crime and unlawful acts students would have the opportunity to properly transition into post-graduate society.

Starting off this post in agreement with Alessandra about the “slightly meta” nature of  discussing Brier and Fabricant on CUNY Commons. It was an odd, inception-like experience, to read about the technology of one’s own institution, and the history behind it, while using it in a separate window. When I got my CUNYFirst account in August, I wondered about the bizarre language like “Human Capital Management.” To read that this technology was a $600 million expense, and an “off-the-shelf system,” developed as a business software in the first place, emphasizes the starkly intimate connection between private profit and our own education (97). I am part of the capital.

Thinking about this monetization of higher education in Austerity Blues has left me feeling quite dejected. I knew things were bad; this book reinforced how bad. The political and economic landscape the authors outline in 2016 is bleak —  let alone factoring in how our current economic state of affairs is contributing to and will continue to impact austerity measures. As the authors state, “the politics of austerity is largely a politics of disposability for populations defined as disposable. Paradoxically, institutions of public higher education that have helped to alter life trajectories for students and communities are now increasingly reinforcing, deepening, and extending experiences of disposability” (251). In a climate where the most essential workers, disproportionately poorer people of color, are treated as disposable, how will “the politics of disposability” continue to make the most essential education the most hollow and diluted, deepening these experiences of disposability? I think of my sister’s school district. The private schools in the community have individualized student work plans, teaching training, and enough technology to make the transition to distance learning fairly quickly. The public schools meanwhile, like so many elsewhere across the country, are struggling to adapt. In March, working parents were forced to homeschool their children for weeks before the school found enough laptops to make distance learning work. Not to mention how distance learning itself can collapse feelings of equality in the classroom, as zoom backgrounds expose class difference. I fear for the future, particularly when the present is already so challenging and disheartening.

Is there hope for “redistributive investment, emancipatory education, and most importantly social justice?” (251). The authors outline that if there is, new forms of technology, shaped by faculty and students, and divorced from private interest, must be part of the solution (251). Is this kind of technology possible? I think if there is a critical juncture where we will find out, it is now, as we are all forced to enter into this online learning experiment. The first of its kind!

On a tentatively hopeful note, I am reminded of the emphasis on hapticality in The Undercommons. Moten and Harney suggest that there is a “ touch of the undercommons, the interiority of sentiment, the feel that what is to come is here. Hapticality, the capacity to feel though others, for others to feel through you, for you to feel them feeling you, this feel of the shipped is not regulated, at least not successfully, by a state, a religion, a people, an empire, a piece of land, a totem” (98).  While distance-learning technology physically separates students from students, teachers from students, and teachers from teachers, it also paradoxically allows an element of humanity to re-enter back into these virtually cultivated relationships. Where private interest would seek to commercialize the learning experience in terms of efficiency and capital, right now, in our bumbling learning stages, you can’t help but hear a professor’s dog barking, a peer’s infant crying, or see a much needed cup of coffee magically appear in a background thanks to someone’s friend, parent or partner. Not to mention the shared struggles of remembering to press mute! Right now it seems like we are all a little bit more vulnerable and a little bit more human. 

Could online learning not only “distribute and organize knowledge” for the needs of public higher education but also enhance the “capacity to feel through others” and “for others to feel through you?” If this kind of humanity is preserved in this online space, could it deepen or enhance the “touch of the undercommons?” I would like to hope so, and I imagine we will find out.  

Reading this text left me feeling hopeful and conflicted. Hopeful because it’s been assigned to students at the highest level of a system strangled by austerity. We are the future leaders of thought in CUNY. Conflicted because I find myself in a position to reflect on this reading from several perspectives. Firstly, as a student of CUNY since 2006 who has earned his AA, BA, MA, and eventually his PhD.; secondly, as an administrator within CUNY since 2013 having served in several roles; lastly as an adjunct faculty member having taught at Hunter and Brooklyn Colleges since 2016. I am also a proud dues-paying member of the PSC-CUNY union and pay dues from multiple roles I hold within CUNY. So many parts of this reading forced me to reflect on my experiences. Below are some of my reflections.

“Academically challenged”- The text refers to many of the students CUNY targeted in its attempts to become an open admissions university as academically challenged (pages 70, 117, 122 are some examples). I took offense to this rhetoric. For me, this term implied that students coming into CUNY (the Black and Puerto Ricans especially focused on in the text) were somehow deficient in their ability to succeed. This view and the rhetoric of “academically challenged” perpetuates the very systemic inequalities which CUNY was claiming to attempt to mitigate. If students were “academically challenged” it was not because they were deficient but, rather, it was because the system of education had never considered them as relevant participants whose experiences and culture mattered. If CUNY was going to perpetuate the inequalities saw in K-12 then hadn’t CUNY already failed?

Furthermore, this rhetoric is not unique to the social times of the 1960s and 1970s. Recently, in 2018, a Distinguished Professor at Brooklyn College. Dr. Rohit Parikh, wrote a social media post in which he said, “Hispanics are GOOD people, gentle and nice and not at all criminal… but are they really the population which America needs for the rest of this century when more and more education is required?” (https://nypost.com/2018/10/23/professor-faces-backlash-after-questioning-desirability-of-hispanic-immigrants/). So as recent as 2018, we see that faculty still have the same perceptions that existed at CUNY’s inception.

To briefly add to this anti-Hispanic perception, some CUNY campuses have considered eliminating the foreign language requirement at the 4-year schools for the science majors so that students can focus more on their major-related courses. This would, of course, be detrimental to the same programs which the text identifies students having fought so hard to put in place through their activism in the 1960s and 1970s.

The Business Model of Education- On page 117, the authors discuss Moody’s Business Model of Education. Essentially, higher education institutions had to run more like a business in response to policies of austerity imposed by the states. In CUNY this played out as a centralization of power to a “CUNY Central Office” and, later, the implementation of CUNYFirst. There is no real shame or attempts to hide this- we use what is essentially an Employee ID (EMPLID) as our identifying number within CUNY. Centralizing bureaucratic power to one office and/or collection of people necessitates an inflated number of administrators to run these offices. This is discussed on page 122 when the authors say, “Also, the escalation in the numbers of college administrators, many with outsized salaries relative to those of the instructional workforce, is another type of growing inequality.” This is seen all around CUNY. Most glaringly is that reliance of part time faculty which the text discusses in great detail because there are no funds to hire full-time faculty since there are too many administrators.

One example of the inequality between administrators and faculty (and, by extension, students) has happened in response to financial constraints brought on by the pandemic we’re currently experiencing. The state and city are strapped for cash and so CUNY has to save money to try to close the gap left by what public funding cannot provide. The solution? Terminate the part-time workers of course. John Jay proposed terminating 400 adjuncts while Brooklyn College and other campuses suggested budget cuts across the board by up to 25%. Where would academic programs find budget cuts if not by reducing the number of faculty? (Union plug: this information is shared through the PSC-CUNY so if you haven’t joined the union you certainly should). The administration didn’t consider cutting themselves and why would they? Here is the inherent problem with the business model. A business model is run by administrators who will, first and foremost, act in their own interests. So you have college presidents making upwards from 300K annually, not including any perks, but instead the colleges decide to cut the instructors who are teaching the majority of students while making roughly 5K per semester. That’s 10K annually. For further information, you could visit https://www.seethroughny.net/payrolls to view all CUNY administrator and faculty salaries at the senior and professional colleges. As NYS employees, salaries are public knowledge.

One other side effect that the text discusses that I found intriguing was the push for students to maximize their course loads to graduate quickly. These pushes are made by administrators with little regard to the academic success of the students. If CUNY is serving a largely minority and/or impoverished community (the “academically challenged”) then pushing students to maximize their course load is an incredible disservice. For example, Brooklyn College has a program which encourages students to take 15 credits per semester and/or summer courses to make sure they can graduate in 4 years. Additionally, Brooklyn College has a grading scale that is much less demanding than other CUNY senior schools and certainly than private schools (Brooklyn College offers the grade of C-, 63-66 points, as the lowest passing grade while Hunter College’s lowest passing grade is a C, 70 points). There is an implication here that Brooklyn College does not think their students can produce the same academic work as even their peers at other CUNY senior colleges and has chosen to just push the students out while reducing standards.

There is much more that I can say but instead I will end with a series of questions that the text raised for me since this is meant to be a short blog response. Is open admissions good for senior colleges?; Is it wrong to reward students based on merit?; Are we addressing the problem from the wrong perspective? Maybe we can focus on reshaping education to value the experiences and cultures are the diverse student body of CUNY rather than lower standards so that students can meet the demands of a system instituted by heterosexual, white, male, elites.; How should CUNY generate money if not through tuition?

Reading Austerity Blues was an anxious experience. I often found myself imagining how Fabricant and Brier are probably pulling out their hair seeing how their analyses and predictions have come home to roost in the wake of the accelerating conservative/far-right movements across the USA as well as, of course, the coronavirus pandemic and the resulting economic crash. If this book gestures towards unsustainable choices (“austerity”) in their potential to escalate social and economic “tensions”—then, well, we’re living it.

There are a few structural elements and arguments I appreciated about Austerity Blues. One is that Fabricant and Brier connect the discussion of CUNY and public higher education to the politics and economics of education in general, illustrating how K-12 public (or not) education both mirrors through policy higher education and invariably impacts the structure of higher education. I think about that in the context of the current crisis of public schools in New York City and the impending possibility of a teachers’ strike. Just the rhetoric surrounding the transition to remote learning, the delays of school opening, the unequal resource distribution along lines of racial/class inequality, and the incessant blaming of teachers all reflect in Austerity. 

And that’s not to mention the national attack on public education as “propaganda”—something Fabricant and Brier were not even ready to predict. Sure, public higher education is directly intertwined with the rise of student movements (as F&B explain in Chapter 3) and therefore become fuel for right-wing reactionary politics (weird to find out that’s how Reagan got his start) that decry the brainwashing of liberal institutions. That’s a calling card for the entire Republican party and the far-right and dovetails with a general rejection of science alongside what is seen as intellectualization of identity ie. identity politics, intersectionality, critical race theory, gender studies. But…public school education? Howard Zinn? Sorry, that rhetorical attack just hit different today…I think, for me, it represents a significant shift in public rhetoric since this book’s publication in 2015 that continues to alarm and renegotiate public thought.

There is more to say about Austerity Blues, but I’d like to turn and address the podcast episode with Inside Higher Ed about the impact of coronavirus on CUNY. To be honest, when listening to this discussion, I felt ambivalent at best and cynically frustrated at worst. While the individual speakers all brought up some useful points and shared valuable stories of their experiences last semester, I can’t help but rear skepticism toward attempts to reflect, rationalize, or even intellectualize the ongoing trauma of the covid crisis. There is a moment in the podcast episode when the host asks the students, “Was there some good that came out of it?” and I found that question alarming, especially directly in toe with a conversation about toxic optimism. However, it is not the specific focus on the good that threw me; rather, it is the attempt to glean morals, lessons—perhaps in the words of Moten/Harney “policy”—out of the current crisis (emphasis on current, we are right in its clutches). I assuredly find it impossible to ask such questions right now, and am not sure if they are worth asking until after the bigger battles ahead have passed. I would argue the feeling of crisis, of dislocation, and of trauma, is currently unavoidable and therefore not worth rationalizing away, but rather…well, I don’t know what to do with it.

I think something I can never wrap my head around when thinking about making change in public education seems to require so many different (competing?) groups to come together. Brier and Fabricant’s framing of Pathways is something that resonates with a lot of the experiences I’ve had teaching at CUNY. Essentially, Pathways is a kind of standardization across campuses that makes it easier to transfer – a standardization that “streamlines” and, thus, makes it easier to hit our numbers re: graduation. This IS an austerity measure and it also IS something that is ostensibly good for students and that they want, BUT what is lost in this process? Brier and Fabricant would say this notion is lost: “Our belief is that higher education must enable students to locate what and how they are learning within the context of their experience. Ideas must travel back and forth between their history, a larger social context, and the independent life of an idea or body of ideas. Without such a progressive trajectory, learning is stagnant and unlikely to be dynamic or of enduring value” (249).

This framing really contextualized some of my experiences teaching at CUNY Start (CS) at QCC. CS was founded as an intensive alternative to non-credit remedial courses, one that was $75 dollars, all inclusive. Students essentially are in class for five days a week, five hours a day, 2.5 hours for English and 2.5 hours for math (instructors taught two sections a day, making a whopping 25 contact hour week). It’s a very hard program to explain to people, and it has some similarities with the original SEEK program (although, notably, SEEK explicitly articulated itself as a racial/economic justice program, which CS does not). Back when I was hired, there was a VERY robust training process that was genuinely transformative for me, especially insofar as it valued the nurturing of learning communities. Even though, when I was initially hired, the final assessment would be the standardized CUNY exams, the training really emphasized that this was not a test prep program; while we would do some work to familiarize students with the exams, the core of the work would be in reading, writing, and critical thinking more broadly. And it genuinely did feel like that. It was the first time I had taught without grading – at all, and I think it was in these days that I really strengthened my ability to nurture intrinsic motivation and help maintain an environment based on mutual trust; it was MORE pressure to create engaging assignments, lessons, etc.

When the tests were eventually de-emphasized with the hope of phasing them out completely, at first I was happy because the tests were bad. What became clear, though, is that the dropping of the tests was about money and about “streamlining” remediation; QCC planned to get rid of conventional remedial classes altogether at this point, and so our program was a key player in this “streamlining” effort. So I found myself involved in fewer conversations about teaching, and more about…norming and rubrics, none of which involved critical thinking or creative thinking or commanding voice or anything like that, and bringing that up would almost be treated like a distraction to the “real” conversation – so much so that I thinking reading AB and all the work on SEEK in Professor Brier’s class had this kind of like, “holy shit! I wasn’t thinking completely ridiculous things” effect on me. And also it just became increasingly clear how the desire for students to get out of remediation quickly was not matched by initiatives to improve the quality of their education or provide them with more resources. Something that started emerging was hard decisions about whether or not to pass students who would almost definitely not pass a 101 class; both options seemed harmful because neither would help the student get the necessary resources. With reservations, at this point I actually advocated for “pass” to be a 70 as opposed to the suggested 65 or 60; it seemed to me to send a demoralizing and insulting message to students to tell them a D was “good enough.”

I think I just told that anecdote to give an example of how austerity driven measures (like streamlining) can SEEM good and in some ways actually BE good, but it throws the vision Brier and Fabricant have of education out the window. It’s a cheery vision of what school can do, for sure, that our conversations in this class have me questioning. I’m re-reading this book at the same time as I’m reading The Teacher Wars by Dana Goldstein, and I just finished the chapter about teacher’s union conflicts with community control advocates, and reading it it’s really wild to me how conversations and debates around public education have been really just recurring. Brier and Fabricant argue for the necessity of forming a “coherent” language that really fundamentally shifts people’s conception of education, one that will create a situation where faculty, students, and community members fight against austerity measures together. I think one example of that is naturalizing an idea like, say, “Our teaching conditions are students’ learning conditions.” But so many things are hard about solidarity. So many different people in the PSC, with ostensibly different interests….also teacher solidarity can be hard when CUNY does have actually bad teachers….

I’m obviously getting tired and should stop before elaborating on that last point. I wanted to end by really encouraging people to read about SEEK, and especially…if we get back to campus because I don’t think there are digital versions?…read the work by June Jordan, Audre Lorde, Toni Cade Bambara, and Adrienne Rich re: their time in SEEK that has been compiled by the Lost & Found Project.

Growing up in the South Bronx, living there for over 27 years, then working as an educator, activist, and artist in the community, and in similar, and not so similar, communities for over 13 years, much of what I read in Brier/Fabricant’s Austerity Blues was not new to me. So, I want to spend some time in my post just sharing some of my thoughts based on my personal experience influenced by my reading of the text. Mostly, I want to continue our discussion on mass incarceration and link that with the connections made in the book between privatization and public education.

All of my siblings work in education. One of my sisters is a K-2 teacher in a charter school in the South Bronx that is part of UFT (United Federation of Teachers). A few years back, my sister attended a meeting (I don’t remember if it was a UFT meeting or a professional development meeting) regarding certain changes that would be made to the standardized exams second graders are given in New York State. During that meeting my sister was shocked to learn that in the past, the outcome of the students’ performance on that exam was used to determine how many new prisons would be opened. My sister was, and is, well aware of the school to prison pipeline—as anyone who is a product of the NYC public school system can share with you—her shock was over the insidious way in which that pipeline is constructed. Even today if you were to walk in my old neighborhood in the South Bronx (161^st and the Grand Concourse) you would find evidence of this inscribed on the landscape. There are almost two dozen public and/or charter schools within a six-block radius, whose epicenter is the Bronx District Attorney’s office, the Criminal Court house, and the Bronx Supreme Court building. This distinction is not lost to the people who reside there. (And for years it has been frustrating for many of us whenever we encountered literature or listened to politicians give some Moynihanian explanation for the lack of Black and Latino men in academia and/or the workplace. Frustrating mostly because we knew where they were and how they got there.) Despite and in spite of this, many of the members of my community, who are predominately working- and middle-class Black and Latino, struggle to efficiently mobilize against these forces. How can you when it’s not financially feasible to homeschool your children? Still, we struggle and continue to find ways to fight for our children’s education.

In recent years, I have been excited that the conversations we’ve been having for decades in our community had finally gained some national attention when Mayor DeBlassio addressed the racial inequality in admissions to the Specialized high schools Stuyvesant, Bronx High School of Science and Brooklyn Tech. While Black and Latinos make up over 80% of New York City public school students, according to the New York Times, in 2019 of the 900 students admitted into the specialized high schools only 7 were Black. (I think the number of students admitted this year was just as low.) The exciting thing, for me, was how the discussions about the Specialized high schools led to discussions about the unequal distribution of wealth in public and private schools. Specifically, how the taxes taken from communities like the one I hail from are distributed to private schools in the upper East side and other wealthy neighborhoods in New York. This is important to me because that means that on some level what’s being done and said in my community is making some difference, effecting some change. What would give it a bigger push is the policy changes outlined in the last chapter of Brier/Fabricant’s book. What is missing from those suggested policy changes, however, is a concrete and more direct linkage to the legacy of racist, misogynistic, and white supremacist antebellum and postbellum public policies with the public policies initiated by WWII that shaped public and higher education.

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”?