"Public reports stating otherwise are premature and based on speculation and incomplete information."

Yesterday I argued that the new partnership between Yale and the defense department ought to be read through the historical lens of the university's relationship with the state over the course of the last sixty years and the changing alchemy of the colonial relationship between post-industrial town and globalized gown.  Today, responding to media furor over reports of the new center's intentions to test interrogation on the minds and bodies of New Haven's immigrant population, Yale spokesperson (and former Eidelson nemesis) Tom Conroy puts forth this very history as an argument for why critics should shut up and trust the university's administration.

Volunteer interviewees would be selected from diverse ethnic groups who would be protected by oversight from Yale's Human Research Protection Program. Research would be conducted in a manner consistent with all other research at Yale and with the expectation that findings would be reported in peer-reviewed scientific journals.

In short, the center, if established, would be designed in the best traditions of Yale research and scholarship.

But, as I suggested in my post yesterday, these traditions are themselves at issue.  How rigorously  and on what criteria the university's human subjects review board will screen the Department of Defense's initiatives remains a serious issue, but, as Batraville and Lew noted in their op-ed, there are larger issues at work than how the university and military find uses for poor and working class New Haveners.  We also have to ask why - what are the politics of this alliance, on both a global and metropolitan scale?  What are the forms of coloniality Yale and the DOD trace and reinscribe?  How does this center demonstrate continuities with and where does it break from the long history of the university's partnerships with the military and the state and with its use of the city as cheap labor, real estate, and research material?

Speaking of the university's coloniality, there is a long story in this week's edition of the Village Voice reporting on the current faculty rebellion against the NYU administration's janus-faced expansion plans in New York City and across the globe.  After a long period of quiescence from all but the most stalwart of the administration's faculty opposition, NYU's tenured professoriate's prerogatives have been so abused by the Sexton administration's top-down evangelical neoliberalism that faculty are organizing for a no confidence vote.  I'm skeptical of some of the rallying cries faculty sometimes use in opposing the NYU administration.  Collegiality and faculty governance mean almost as little to most of the university's workers - including the vast majority of its teachers, most of whom are adjuncts and precarious low wage graduate student teaching assistants - as they do to Sexton and his squadron of yes-men and women on the twelfth floor of the library.  More heartening are the ways in which faculty have taken up the question of the relationship between university expansion and student debt, the ways in which they understand the impossibility of an easy return to a mythic golden age of faculty democracy.   

Andrew Ross, a professor of social and cultural analysis at NYU and a vocal critic of the administration, suggests that there's something more systemic going on: The American university may be assuming a strange new role. Ross argues that the "interlocking directorates" of power theorized by C. Wright Mills 50 years ago—corporate, governmental, and military interests—is being updated. Universities like NYU, he says, are becoming "players in their own right."

 Up here in Albany, I feel pretty distant from NYU.  That distance lets me say things like that I think the faculty's success may depend in part on the role that student activists and grad employees (not to mention other groups of workers) will play in this developing movement - some have been working with the faculty.  I do not think that even a sizeable minority of NYU's already small minority of tenured teachers and researchers has enough institutional power at this point to beat the administration.  But I'm in Albany, not NYC, and therefore can offer no responsible diagnosis of the extent to which the faculty have secured alliances with other campus workers.  Victories at NYU - both in the form of the no-confidence vote and on the still nebulously demarcated prospect of a new GSOC election - would be a big fucking deal.

Still, though, given the relations of force within the higher education "industry," the discourse of collegiality, of the abrogation of faculty privilege, seems all the more insufficient.  At a moment when universities are selling naming rights to notorious private prison corporations, nostalgia for a past that was never quite as idyllic as its advocates imagine seems particularly unstrategic.  As university administrators increasingly fetishize MOOCs and other phantasms of a precarious present, academic workers need to think more expansively about what we are fighting for and with whom we are fighting.

Either that, or we should just tear everything down and build something else instead.

Probably both.

Subprime Student Debt

Some 33% of the U.S.' student debt, explains this Wall Street Journal article about a new TransUnion report, is now held by people whom the rating agencies classify as subprime borrowers.  This is debt that may never be repaid.  A third of subprime student debt - one ninth of the U.S. total student debt, was 90 days or more past due in March of last year, the article notes, a nine percent increase from a 2007 figure.  Student debt, a ubiquity across much of the  U.S. student and professional population, is only likely to continue to grow as the gap between the rising cost of tuition and declining real wages expands.

Why are TransUnion, Fitch, and Moody's interested in, and rating, student debt?  Because of the market in Student Loan Asset-Backed Securities, (SLABS,) the trade in securitized student debt.  The prospect of a market failure akin to the one spurred by the collapse of the subprime housing debt market five years ago has led many to invoke the specter of another bubble.  But, as Malcolm Harris has argued, perceptively, student debt, as one of a very few types of debt from which their can be no legal release, is, like court-imposed criminal penalties and child support, in something of a class of its own.  As Harris notes:

Besides, no interested party cares if student debtors pay up soon; they will have to someday, and the longer it takes them, the more interest accrues, the bigger the haul. In the meantime, markets and investors are empowered to just pretend the money is there anyway.

Thus, the metaphor of the bubble is problematic.  Harris suggests that this subprime will yield no burst, but instead will slowly "fill with value from the bottom," in the form of commdified labor extorted from borrowers by a mixture of state and non-state forms of coercion.  "Assuming current rates of repayment and issuance," Harris concludes, "the $1 trillion outstanding total will double within a decade. And short of suicide, expatriation, or revolt, there’s not much 37 million American student debtors and counting can do about it."

If there's good news, it's that the beginnings of that revolt may be underway.  In the last few years organizations like the Edu-factory collective, the Occupy Student Debt Campaign, and now Strike Debt (which has a meeting this comming Sunday from 2-4 PM at Judson Memorial Church in Manhattan) have staked out the lines of an incipient debtor revolt.  How this revolt develops, and what other forms it generates are, as always, up to us to determine.