Hey, AU: We are students, not customers
By Ian Evans
Education Not Debt Coalition, Fossil-Free AU
I walked down the hall, about a hundred yards in total to the three-shower-stall bathroom I shared with about 35 other 19-year-olds. I found a stall and stripped down to face the bitter chill of the bathroom (which was weird because it was in the middle of a huge 7-8 story building. I bent down and turned the shower all the way to the hot side (I knew the hot water wasn’t going to be very warm, because it usually isn’t). To my dismay, I discovered that after a few seconds, the water was still ice-cold. I stood there shaking and shivering, fiddling with the temperature knob as my other arm dangled in the falling water. As I was doing this, I began thinking about my tuition money- and most importantly: where the hell was it?
From the first semester of my first year, I was slapped in the face by an incredible administrative bureaucracy that characterizes the state of “upper tier” American universities. The university decisions are made by a group of mostly rich, old, white men who are real estate moguls, financial executives, and heads of major banks--not the sort of people you’d expect to be in touch with average American students. This group at AU is known as the Board of Trustees.
Last semester, I participated in AU’s powerful fossil fuel divestment campaign. Through that experience, I began to truly understand the economic and socio-political corruption of the University model. The Fossil Free AU (FFAU) coalition was the first student movement in the history of AU to meet with Trustee members in small groups. Nevertheless, the members of the Board failed to truly engage with us. They didn’t answer our letters about the moral arguments for fossil fuel divestment. They refused to return our phone calls. The head of the Finance and Investment Committee called in to the Board meeting at which divestment was discussed; he wouldn’t even show up in person. Members usually refrain from speaking to students, are rarely on campus, and don’t even care enough to show up to discuss an issue that 80 percent of students support. How can they be expected to vote with our best interests in mind if they make no effort to learn about our concerns and priorities? We are the source of 81 percent of the school’s revenue, so shouldn’t they have to care about our interests?
The answer is no. We don’t reap the benefits of the $60,000 we shell out on a yearly basis--instead paying for the enhancement of our education in the form of more needs-based financial aid and better-paid teachers, too much of our tuition goes toward building maintenance, administrative salaries, and real estate developments such as the Tenley and East Campuses. Our student and faculty trustees do not even get a vote on the Board. At AU, we are treated as voiceless, undervalued consumers.
But students do not have to be voiceless. In 2012, the Canadian city of Quebec witnessed one of the most impactful student movements in history. Faced with a staggering 75 percent tuition increase over 5 years for all Quebec public universities, students assembled and went on strike. On March 22, as many as 300,000 of Quebec’s 400,000 public university students refused to attend classes, organizing picket lines surrounding their empty classrooms instead. The group that materialized to spearhead this "Red Square Movement" was called Coalition Large De l’Association Pour Une Solidarité Syndicale Étudiante (CLASSE). Despite being excluded from attempts to resolve the issue by the Canadian government, and after a controversial provincial law prohibited demonstration near a university, hundreds of thousands of Canadians took to the streets of Montreal that spring. Labor organizations moved across the country in support of CLASSE’s mission. This student protest blossomed into a mass movement against the Quebec Liberal Party (PLQ), the neoliberal government in power at the time. In the fall of 2012, the opposition group known as the Parti Quebecois was elected as a minority government and abolished the proposed tuition raises.
I believe something like this needs to happen in America. Now, I’m not expecting or condoning a 200,000-student strike in the name of a tuition freeze. But I implore people to wake up and reject the university model of the neoliberal revolution that concerns itself more with petty rankings and marketing to prospective students than it does with a quality educational experience. As citizens of this country, we deserve an accessible higher education. Among other things, we need to understand that universities like ours treat prospective applicants like customers, and exploit their own students for the sake of rankings, construction, and staggering administrative salaries.
When I talk to fellow students here about debt and university corporatization issues, the response is usually one of callous acceptance and depression. Students realize that debt hurts us and constricts the way we live, but many don’t think it is their issue to solve. Keeping the events of Montreal in 2012 and my school’s fossil fuel divestment campaign in context, people would be surprised by how much power we, the students, have.
Today, for the second time this month, 40 students lined the hallway to the room where the University Budget Committee meets to discuss our own tuition hikes. Similar to the politicians in Montreal that tried to outlaw student protest, officers from our campus police came to threaten us with arrest for standing quietly in a dormitory hallway. As they swung handcuffs in our faces and told us to disperse, it was clear that the administration does not believe that American University belongs to the students.
The path to a more just and accessible higher education in the United States will prove more arduous than in Quebec. Often, this reality leads students to abandon hope. But we need the opposite reaction. We need to students to stand up for their rights--to an education, to free speech on campus, to assemble in the buildings which are still being paid off with our tuition money. Because the system uniquely burdens students with this problem, we are the only ones who can--and will--solve it.
Education Not Debt Coalition, Fossil-Free AU
I walked down the hall, about a hundred yards in total to the three-shower-stall bathroom I shared with about 35 other 19-year-olds. I found a stall and stripped down to face the bitter chill of the bathroom (which was weird because it was in the middle of a huge 7-8 story building. I bent down and turned the shower all the way to the hot side (I knew the hot water wasn’t going to be very warm, because it usually isn’t). To my dismay, I discovered that after a few seconds, the water was still ice-cold. I stood there shaking and shivering, fiddling with the temperature knob as my other arm dangled in the falling water. As I was doing this, I began thinking about my tuition money- and most importantly: where the hell was it?
From the first semester of my first year, I was slapped in the face by an incredible administrative bureaucracy that characterizes the state of “upper tier” American universities. The university decisions are made by a group of mostly rich, old, white men who are real estate moguls, financial executives, and heads of major banks--not the sort of people you’d expect to be in touch with average American students. This group at AU is known as the Board of Trustees.
Last semester, I participated in AU’s powerful fossil fuel divestment campaign. Through that experience, I began to truly understand the economic and socio-political corruption of the University model. The Fossil Free AU (FFAU) coalition was the first student movement in the history of AU to meet with Trustee members in small groups. Nevertheless, the members of the Board failed to truly engage with us. They didn’t answer our letters about the moral arguments for fossil fuel divestment. They refused to return our phone calls. The head of the Finance and Investment Committee called in to the Board meeting at which divestment was discussed; he wouldn’t even show up in person. Members usually refrain from speaking to students, are rarely on campus, and don’t even care enough to show up to discuss an issue that 80 percent of students support. How can they be expected to vote with our best interests in mind if they make no effort to learn about our concerns and priorities? We are the source of 81 percent of the school’s revenue, so shouldn’t they have to care about our interests?
The answer is no. We don’t reap the benefits of the $60,000 we shell out on a yearly basis--instead paying for the enhancement of our education in the form of more needs-based financial aid and better-paid teachers, too much of our tuition goes toward building maintenance, administrative salaries, and real estate developments such as the Tenley and East Campuses. Our student and faculty trustees do not even get a vote on the Board. At AU, we are treated as voiceless, undervalued consumers.
But students do not have to be voiceless. In 2012, the Canadian city of Quebec witnessed one of the most impactful student movements in history. Faced with a staggering 75 percent tuition increase over 5 years for all Quebec public universities, students assembled and went on strike. On March 22, as many as 300,000 of Quebec’s 400,000 public university students refused to attend classes, organizing picket lines surrounding their empty classrooms instead. The group that materialized to spearhead this "Red Square Movement" was called Coalition Large De l’Association Pour Une Solidarité Syndicale Étudiante (CLASSE). Despite being excluded from attempts to resolve the issue by the Canadian government, and after a controversial provincial law prohibited demonstration near a university, hundreds of thousands of Canadians took to the streets of Montreal that spring. Labor organizations moved across the country in support of CLASSE’s mission. This student protest blossomed into a mass movement against the Quebec Liberal Party (PLQ), the neoliberal government in power at the time. In the fall of 2012, the opposition group known as the Parti Quebecois was elected as a minority government and abolished the proposed tuition raises.
I believe something like this needs to happen in America. Now, I’m not expecting or condoning a 200,000-student strike in the name of a tuition freeze. But I implore people to wake up and reject the university model of the neoliberal revolution that concerns itself more with petty rankings and marketing to prospective students than it does with a quality educational experience. As citizens of this country, we deserve an accessible higher education. Among other things, we need to understand that universities like ours treat prospective applicants like customers, and exploit their own students for the sake of rankings, construction, and staggering administrative salaries.
When I talk to fellow students here about debt and university corporatization issues, the response is usually one of callous acceptance and depression. Students realize that debt hurts us and constricts the way we live, but many don’t think it is their issue to solve. Keeping the events of Montreal in 2012 and my school’s fossil fuel divestment campaign in context, people would be surprised by how much power we, the students, have.
Today, for the second time this month, 40 students lined the hallway to the room where the University Budget Committee meets to discuss our own tuition hikes. Similar to the politicians in Montreal that tried to outlaw student protest, officers from our campus police came to threaten us with arrest for standing quietly in a dormitory hallway. As they swung handcuffs in our faces and told us to disperse, it was clear that the administration does not believe that American University belongs to the students.
The path to a more just and accessible higher education in the United States will prove more arduous than in Quebec. Often, this reality leads students to abandon hope. But we need the opposite reaction. We need to students to stand up for their rights--to an education, to free speech on campus, to assemble in the buildings which are still being paid off with our tuition money. Because the system uniquely burdens students with this problem, we are the only ones who can--and will--solve it.