The fight to fund our universities

January 10, 2012

ON DECEMBER 16, Mary Sue Coleman, the president of the University of Michigan (UM) delivered an open letter to Barack Obama. This letter addressed the rising cost of college education by noting "the state's significant disinvestment in higher education," going so far as to affirm that there is "no stronger trigger for rising costs at public universities and colleges than declining state support."

Four proposals were then advanced to combat this trend: "first and foremost" Coleman wrote, "it is essential that states reinvest in their public colleges and universities." So why, on December 15--one day prior to the letter's release--did Occupy UM abruptly cut off Coleman by calling "mic-check!" as she began her introduction to the monthly Board of Regents meeting?

If Coleman's letter had ended after her call for states to invest in higher education, Occupy UM might have found a powerful new ally. Indeed, if this letter ended by insisting that we fight the state's disinvestment in higher education--the consequences of which range from prohibitively expensive annual tuition raises to the shocking figure of $1 trillion in student indebtedness--I would be surprised at Coleman's reticence the day before in not joining us in our message announcing our fight for a truly public and accessible university.

If this was also her mission, our "mic check" would not have been to cut her off. Rather, we would have been amplifying her voice!

But her letter, like the meeting we disrupted, did not end there. Coleman goes on to propose that private philanthropy be prominent in sustaining funding for the university, and concludes by stating that "universities must continue to cut costs."

The meeting of the regents went on to discuss the Michigan Investment in New Technology Startups (MINTS) initiative, in which faculty members are provided endowment-supported financial incentives for directing research towards potentially commercial results, as well as funding for new construction and renovation projects.

The very "comprehensiveness" of Coleman's letter is what renders it so ideologically sophisticated: By outlining a multi-pronged approach to the challenge of affordable education in which all options are on the table (state reinvestment, philanthropy, business support and more cuts), Coleman appears to pursue a pragmatic, apolitical course to solving the problem.

But this is where we must have the courage to ask the "simple" question: If we seriously pursued the first option (state reinvestment, including more taxation, if necessary), then why must we rely on wealthy donors, or lay off professors and workers with more cuts?

We protested to reject the so-called "pragmatism" of university "leaders," which in reality stands for passively and opportunistically dismantling the university by transforming it into a degenerative corporation. We will not be seduced by such posturing in the face of (in Coleman's words) this "thorny issue." We reject the horizon of the problem as these technocrats attempt to define it, and continue to insist on the fight for an accessible university.

We know the stakes: continue down this path of privatization, in which the university devolves into a cloistered corporation closed to the public. Or, simply, retake the university. We mic-checked the regents to announce that this is the terrain of the fight: there is no middle ground.
Brendan Flynn, Ann Arbor, Mich.

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