Seeing in the Red: Looking at Student Debt

n n th R d: L n t t d nt D bt

Curtis Marez

American Quarterly, Volume 66, Number 2, June 2014, pp. 261-281 (Article)

Published by The Johns Hopkins University PressDOI: 10.1353/aq.2014.0019

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| 261Looking at Student Debt

©2014 The American Studies Association

Seeing in the Red: Looking at Student Debt

Curtis Marez

Currently exceeding $1 trillion, federal student debt in the United States has surpassed credit card debt, emerging as a brutal force of domination in contemporary universities and beyond.1 As Jeffrey J.

Williams argues, student debt “is not just a mode of finance but of mode of pedagogy.” It teaches that “higher education is a consumer service”; that ca-reer choices should be tailored to servicing debt; that the rule of the capitalist market is “natural, inevitable, and implacable”; “that democracy is a market” which obligates citizens to capital; and finally, that inequality is not a collective but an individual problem.2 To paraphrase from the 2013 American Studies Association conference theme, the contemporary university of debt creates a hierarchy of value in which nonnormative immigrants, unpropertied, illegal, indigenous, marginalized, or queer others are cast as in debt or as “failed” subjects. For these and other reasons, the critique of student debt involves, in the suggestive phrase contributed to the conference theme by Lisa Lowe, “a critique of fidelity to the normative.”

In tonight’s address I attempt to center collective dissent to student debt in American studies. At the same time, I outline an American studies version of critical university studies. In his groundbreaking book Black Marxism: The Making of the Black Radical Tradition, Cedric Robinson argued that the construction of Black people as racial inferiors was not incidental but integral to the historical development of capitalism. Robinson coined the term “ra-cial capitalism” to refer to “the development, organization, and expansion of capitalist society” in “racial directions” such that “as a material force” racialism permeates capitalist social structures.”3 Capitalism has been wedded to white supremacy, and anti-Black racism has helped make capitalist exploitation seem not only necessary but also right. Robinson subsequently developed this line of thought in his book Forgeries of Memory and Meaning: Blacks and the Regimes of Race in the American Theater and Film before World War II, where he argues that racial representations in classic Hollywood cinema constitute a kind of popular pedagogy of Black inferiority that reinforced racial capi-

| 262 American Quarterly

talism.4 Similarly, I argue that the contemporary regime of university debt constitutes a form of racialized and gendered settler colonial capitalism based on the incorporation of disposable low-wage workers and complicity in the occupation of indigenous lands. The university domination of land and labor, I conclude, is pursued structurally but also ideologically, in film and other media representing campus life.5

I first began thinking about what would become this address in the wake of the mass student protests against budget cuts and increased tuition starting in the fall of 2010 in Puerto Rico, Europe, and the United States. Such protests at UC San Diego, where I teach, were followed in February by protests in re-sponse to a kind of blackface fraternity party called the “Compton Cookout” and the larger pattern of structural racism on campus that made it possible. A month later in March, as part of statewide protests against state funding cuts for higher education, students at UCSD in effect reframed the budget crisis as a racial project and the Compton Cookout as partly an expression of the kinds of privatization that further exclude students of color. That spring quarter, my colleague Yen Espiritu, an ethnic studies scholar, organized a team-taught, undergraduate course called California’s Public Education Crisis, and my contribution to the course was to create a digital archive of movies and TV shows filmed on college and university campuses in California, from the silent era to the present, and a companion lecture about the fantasies and desires for education encoded there.6 The result, which remains available on the “Critical Commons” website, is a project situated at the intersection of American studies, ethnic studies, visual studies, and critical university studies, and it is in that spirit that I make the following presentation.7

In 1970 a number of films about the crises in higher education were released, including RPM (or “Revolutions Per Minute”), which was filmed at the Univer-sity of the Pacific (UOP) in Stockton, California.8 RPM focuses on a conflicted coalition between white and Black student groups during the occupation of the university’s central administration building. The filmmakers employed UOP students as extras, and one of them, Victor F. Ornelas, was the president of the campus chapter of Movimiento Estudiantil Chicano de Aztlán (MEChA). He recalls that at the time of the filming it was in fact a group of students in MEChA and the Black Student Union who marched on the administration with demands for access and inclusion.9 At the start of the film, however, the fictional students demand that the radical sociologist Professor F. W. J. “Paco” Perez, played by the Chicano movie star Anthony Quinn, be appointed uni-versity president. The trustees reluctantly agree, but immediately try to co-opt


Perez and enlist him in their efforts to contain student demands—a prospect the professor seems to anticipate in his first meeting with the trustees.

The scene’s shot–reverse shot struc-ture, combined with Perez’s protective sunglasses, suggests a critical gaze directed at the white supremacist university, here represented by its all-white male trustees. I return to Perez later, but for now let this scene serve as a sort of visual shorthand for critical university studies (CUS), a term coined by Jef-frey J. Williams in a 2012 essay in the Chronicle of Higher Education. Work in CUS, Williams explains, “focuses on the consequences of corporate methods and goals, like corrupting research and increasing managerial over academic control, cutting labor through reducing regular faculty positions (while increas-ing adjunct positions), and exploiting students by requiring them to work more and take on more debt.”10 I would direct you to the extended bibliography in his Chronicle article, but highlight from his list: Marc Bousquet’s How the University Works: Higher Education and the Low-Wage Nation; Michele A. Massé and Katie J. Hogan’s Over Ten Million Served: Gendered Service in Language and Literature Workplaces; Christopher Newfield’s Unmaking the Public Uni-versity: The Forty-Year Assault on the Middle Class; and Williams’s own essays on student debt in Dissent.11 Williams further emphasizes the Internet basis of CUS as represented by Bousquet’s blogs, “How the University Works” and “The Chronicle’s Brainstorm”; Newfield’s site, “Remaking the University”; and the Italian-based international collective Edufactory. At the same time,

Figure 1.Shot–reverse shot sequence from RPM (1970) with Professor Paco Perez and the university trustees.


scholarship in American studies and eth-nic studies has taken the university as its object of analysis, including in works by Noliwe Rooks, Roderick Ferguson, Stefano

Harney and Fred Moten, Grace Hong, Jodi Melamed, and the contributors to two anthologies: Presumed Incompetent: The Intersections of Race and Class for Women in Academia and The Imperial University: Academic Repression and Scholarly Dissent.12

Student debt as a critical problem cut me to the quick last year while I was teaching an undergraduate class on Chicana/o film and media. We screened Salt of the Earth (1954), a movie made by a New Mexican mining community and a racially integrated crew of blacklisted Hollywood filmmakers, about a recent strike that began among mostly Mexican male miners but that was ultimately taken over by Mexican women in the community when a court injunction prevented the men from striking.13 The film is often admired for the way it attempted to represent intersections of class, race, and gender, and this scene of the police interrupting a party in order to repossess a radio purchased on credit grabbed the attention of my students.

Figure 2.The police repossess a radio purchased on credit in Salt of the Earth (1954).


When I explained that in southwestern company towns, management used debt to control labor, one student raised her hand and said, “That sounds like college.” As other students nodded their heads in agreement, we decided to try and list points of comparison between company towns and college campuses. Management in company towns tied workers to the company and limited their alternatives by selling them consumer goods such as cars, washing machines, and radios on credit; students are tied to the university, and their options are limited by crushing levels of debt not only for tuition but also for books, equipment, and computers, all sold by the campus bookstore. In Salt of the Earth, the miners are dependent for food on credit from a company store but credit is cut off when the strike begins; at contemporary colleges and universi-ties students often depend on expensive dorm meal plans, not to mention the fast-food franchises in the student union. While miners were often paid in scrip that was redeemable only in company stores, today’s students use their university-issued IDs like debt cards to pay for goods and services on campus. The workers in Salt rent company-owned shacks and are threatened with evic-tion if they organize; college students rent campus housing and often live in fear of not being able to pay their bills and reenroll. The mining community was dependent on the company for medical care when they were injured at work; contemporary students, who now tend to work long and dangerous hours and are therefore vulnerable to injury and illness, often depend on the university for health care. In the film, the violence of debt is racialized and gendered, such that Mexican men are more vulnerable than their Anglo coworkers, and Mexican women are the most vulnerable of all given their unpaid domestic labor in substandard company housing. Most of the students in my class were women of color, and they testified to how debt made their lives as students especially precarious. In the party scene from Salt, we hear in the background dance music from the radio as Ramon tells Esperanza of his hopes for the strike, and then we hear the voice of the police, but the music stops when they repos-sess the radio. The radio as debt machine is internal to the film’s diegesis, the source of music the characters all hear and dance to until the police pull the plug. In the contemporary college scene, the machinery of debt is the student’s constant surround, an ambient feature of lifeworlds where hope is interrupted by the police, who, in the last instance, enforce debt.

Debt confines students to the status quo by colonizing the future, tying present activities to plans for servicing its imperatives and limiting time for reflection, experimentation, protest, or any other unprofitable endeavors.14 Debt is thus increasingly coming to shape and limit how we imagine the future. This is the case, for example, in several recent works of speculative fiction in


which student debt defines a dystopian future, including Alex Rivera’s film Sleep Dealer (2008).15 As the director explains, the film represents a world where the US–Mexico border has been

closed, and instead of physically migrating to the United States, “workers go to cities in Mexico and work in giant factories or sweatshops where they connect their bodies to high-speed, network-controlled robots that do their labor. So their pure labor crosses the border, but their bodies stay in Mexico.”16 Sleep Dealer focuses on Memo, a migrant to Tijuana from Oaxaca, who has installed electrical nodes all over his body so that he can operate a construction robot in the United States. While most commentary has focused on the high-tech maquiladora where Memo works, the film includes two other characters who also perform long-distance virtual labor: a Chicano drone pilot, Rudy Ramirez, and a recent Mexican college graduate, Luz Martinez, who sells the stories of other working people on the Internet to service her student loan debt.

Rivera has said of this scene that he was attracted to the interface between the contemporary moment of student debt and the speculative future where dreams and memories are for sale, but I would suggest that such an interface characterizes the present, where student hopes for the future are already exploited for profit.17 Recalling the radio repossession scene from Salt of the Earth, the debt collector’s threat of confiscating Luz’s possessions, followed by the imperative to “have a nice day,” effectively deconstructs “the cruel opti-mism of the university of debt.” This last formulation is drawn from the title of a panel organized by Abigail Boggs, a graduate student and member of the

Figure 3.In Sleep Dealer (2008), student debt colonizes the future.


Students’ Committee and ASA Program Committee, that builds on Lauren Berlant’s theorization of “cruel optimism” to analyze the consequences under regimes of debt of imagining the university as a “fundamentally future-oriented institution” that “students and scholars inhabit . . . as an aspirational site of life making.” In Sleep Dealer, the university as debt collector suffocates student aspirations, while the school’s name, “The Institute for Bio-Media,” is sugges-tive of the kinds of biopower that debt reproduces in the form of disciplined low-wage workers.

Student debt teaches lessons in value and difference by reproducing and rearticulating historical forms of racial and gendered capitalism. According to a 2013 study by Brandon A. Jackson and John R. Reynolds, “over 70% of black students who borrow do not receive a college degree. Given that borrowers who do not complete their degree are more likely to be unemployed and default on their loans in comparison with borrowers who complete their degree, these black students face long-term economic disadvantages.”18 This is particularly the case at for-profit schools, where students of color are overrepresented. The numbers are similar in the case of Latino students, and while it is difficult to find data about Native American students, they likely face similar burdens, as is suggested by the out-of-court settlement for Rodriguez and Gregoire v. Sallie Mae, a 2007 class action lawsuit alleging racial discrimination at Sallie Mae in which the loan provider agreed to include Native American students in the settlement class and to advertise the settlement in the Native American Times.

Rodriguez and Gregoire vs. Sallie Mae was filed on behalf of a Latina student named Sasha Rodriguez and a Black student named Cathelyn Gregoire. It alleged that the company had, in a version of student loan redlining, calcu-lated loan fees and rates on the basis of the racial composition of the schools attended by different students, such that students of color attending colleges with relatively higher numbers of minority students received worse loan pack-ages than white students attending less diverse schools. Without admitting any wrongdoing, Sallie Mae settled out of court, and while the focus was on racial discrimination, it also helps us think about student debt at the intersection of race, gender, and other axes of difference.19 Both Rodriguez and Gregoire went into debt to attend for-profit schools owned by the Career Education Corporation, which is infamous for putting profits above graduation and placement rates and whose student body is made up largely of women and people of color who are offered training in service-sector jobs in health care, restaurants and hospitality services, and fashion design and merchandising.20 In this case, debt effectively serves to track women of color into the service sector where, if they do get jobs, servicing their debt works to keep them there.


Not only do women take out student loans in greater numbers than men, but as Amanda Armstrong, a Berkeley graduate student and antiprivatiza-tion activist, explains, women take out larger loans than men, “anticipating that they’ll need to be better credentialed to compete for the same jobs,” and because of the continuing gendered wage gap, it takes women longer to pay off their student debt. Moreover, when combined with cuts in state spending for child care, public housing, and welfare, “debt-financed higher education” intensifies “the burden of unwaged domestic labor . . . that still falls unevenly on women, and particularly on women of color. Student debt captures time that could otherwise be used for care work, among other activities, and captures income that could otherwise go to purchase increasingly privatized goods, such as childcare or housing.”21 Which is to say that debt is a coercive means of gendering and racializing student workers, enforcing and devaluing as forms of feminized and racialized reproductive labor the work that students perform if they graduate but also while they are students.

In How the University Works, Bousquet argues that while administrators are mesmerized by the vision of an online university without workers, their dreams obscure higher education’s ongoing dependence on the labor of part-time faculty, graduate students, and undergraduates. The last three decades have witnessed a dramatic expansion in the university’s exploitation of women workers, who are overrepresented among the ranks of part-time instructors, as well as in the exploitation of undergraduate and graduate student workers, particularly young women and people of color. In such contexts the category of “student” refers to “someone who can be put to work but does not enjoy the rights of labor.”22

The university works by reproducing raced and gendered hierarchies of value, or what I would call forms of raced and gendered settler colonial capitalism specific to universities as employers of labor. “The typical faculty member has become a female nontenurable, part-timer earning a few thousand dollars a year without health benefits. The typical administrator is male, enjoys tenure, a six-figure income, little or no teaching, generous vacations, and great health care.”23 “Nontenurable faculty” and nonteaching staff are more likely to be women and people of color than the tenure-track faculty, while administra-tors are more likely to be white the higher they are in university hierarchies. The ranks of casual, flexible workers in the university are made up of gradu-ate students and former graduate students, often working at poverty wages to service their student loan debts. University regimes of debt devalue student labor to better exploit it by constituting graduate student work as simultane-ously racialized and gendered forms of service. The case of undergraduate


workers compels a similar conclusion. About one-third of college students work thirty-five hours a week or more, but often without the kinds of benefits traditionally linked to full-time employment.24 A large number work directly for the schools they attend, while in many other instances universities partner with private employers to provide them cheap student labor.

The story of two undergraduate roommates, Paige Laurie and Elena Marti-nez, suggests how universities of debt reproduce students as raced and gendered workers. Laurie is the heir not only to the Walmart fortune but also, as I show, to the system of managing a flexible workforce that Walmart pioneered and that contemporary universities emulate. Her parents are also corporate university partners, having given a $25 million naming rights gift to the University of Missouri to build a basketball stadium named for their daughter. The assertion of naming rights by wealthy patrons has a long history, linking universities to white supremacy and empire. As Gauri Viswanathan wrote about the naming of Yale after an East India Company merchant, the practice of naming institu-tions after individuals “gestures toward the survival of the institution beyond the limited lifespan of the individual” by metaphorically translating “biological reproduction into institutional growth.” In this regard “the power of naming” represents “a form of appropriation and possession paralleling—indeed, even perpetuating—acts of territorial acquisition.”25 Given that many public land grant campuses such as the University of Missouri sit on Native land, we can read the claiming of naming rights as a settler colonial gesture consistent with Walmart’s broader exploitation of indigenous workers, lands, and resources.26

In 2001 Laurie the Walmart heiress enrolled at the University of Southern California, where she met Elena Martinez. From a working-class family in Banning, California, Martinez joined the Army Reserves and took out student loans to pay tuition. After Laurie graduated with a degree in communication, Martinez, who remained degreeless, appeared on the news show 20/20 and revealed that for three and a half years Laurie had employed her to write all her course papers and e-mails to professors. Martinez was ultimately forced to drop out and reenroll in a community college when she could not afford USC’s tuition, but she continued to write Laurie’s papers for pay.27

In her interviews with the press, Martinez makes visible the material and ideological pressures that discipline raced and gendered student labor. Like many students, Martinez was forced to service debt by working in undesir-able and precarious jobs, including not only her work for Laurie but also for the Army Reserves, which she joined at a particularly dangerous time in the aftermath of 9/11. At the same time, Martinez’s roommate treated her like a domestic servant: “She’s always had everything done for her. . . . When she first


came I taught her how to do her laundry. I did some of it for her sometimes,” Martinez told 20/20.28 The fact that Laurie required Martinez not only to write course papers but to e-mail professors further suggests the relationship between a manager or administrator and a secretary, a job that, like that of a maid, is also often a raced and gendered position, including in many universities. And the Walmart heiress was a stern taskmistress, sweating her employee to produce the most for the least by yelling at Martinez for small errors in punctuation or a less than perfect grade.29

Finally, this tale of two college roommates suggests how the “cruel opti-mism” of higher education disciplines student labor. Exploited by her wealthy classmate, in debt, and without a degree, Martinez remained positive about her experience: “I learned a lot in her classes. . . . In a way, it was nice because I was getting the quality education I had wanted. . . . I liked the classes Paige took so much I’ve decided to major in the same thing she did,” but in a com-munity college back home.30 And even though the scandal and media attention ultimately forced her to drop out, she vowed to finish college and devote her career to education.31 Here the formal idealization of education, disconnected from historic demands by student movements for educational access as a means of material redistribution, obscures conditions of raced and gendered labor exploitation. This is partly, I suspect, why Martinez repeatedly expressed her feelings of guilt and her need to “take responsibility” for her actions, as though she was a failed student and not an exploited worker, and why most of the media framed the story as one of student cheating and not labor exploitation.32

Universities and corporations increasingly mobilize a kind of educational exceptionalism as a way to control their workers. A good example is the UPS “earn and learn” program in which the company partners with universities to supply undergraduate workers for packing facilities euphemistically referred to as “colleges.” In Jodi Melamed’s account, the UPS slogan “What Can Brown Do for You?” exemplifies “neoliberal multiculturalism.” As she writes, “Brown emerges as an antiracist coalition-building term among people of color, a shorthand for racial pride and solidarity that short-circuited restric-tive black-or-white notions of race relations.” The UPS appropriation of “brown,” however, “kept the color but blotted out the people and the move-ments.” UPS in effect sublated “brown,” canceling out its antiracist history while preserving its positive associations with “pride, warmth, solidarity, and functioning community networks.” “More insidiously,” Melamed concludes that the slogan “What can Brown do for you?” plays on “racist associations of people of color with service.”33 Melamed’s analysis helps us understand UPS’s exploitation of student workers in the guise of multicultural education and


diversity. UPS recruits college students to work the worst and most dangerous shifts loading packages. The company presents the fiction that students are working toward a degree, but the reality is that taking a job at UPS dramati-cally reduces a student’s chances of graduating. Meanwhile, UPS continues to target undergraduate women and, ironically given the history of its slogan, Latinas and Latinos for low-wage service work.34

In The Reorder of Things: The University and Its Pedagogies of Minority Difference, Roderick Ferguson presents a compelling analytic framework for understanding the university’s mobilization of intersecting differences of race, gender, class, sexuality, ability, and nation in the production of surplus values. Ferguson constructs a critical history of contemporary US universities react-ing to the radical student movements of the 1960s and 1970s. Whereas those movements insisted both on more equitable forms of racial representation and on material redistribution, universities responded by focusing on repre-sentation as a way to contain demands for redistribution. Universities thus became laboratories for producing new techniques for managing differences by absorbing them. According to Ferguson, “the academy and things academic” became “conduits for conveying unprecedented forms of political economy to state and capital, forms that would be based on an abstract—rather than a redistributive—valorization of minority difference and culture.”35

Rather than imagine the contemporary university crisis as a reflection or extension of forms of neoliberalism produced elsewhere, as is sometimes sug-gested by phrases like “the corporate university,” Ferguson concludes that in recent history it has in fact been the university that “socializes state and capital into emergent articulations of difference.”36 Which is also to say that part of the pedagogy of student debt is to teach the inevitability and indeed justice of raced and gendered capitalism and the exploitation of low-wage minority workers, both inside and outside the academy. While access and degree rates remain relatively low, when students of color are incorporated into the univer-sity it is often as unpaid diversity workers, not only simply by virtue of their presence on campus and in university promotional materials as representations of institutional diversity, but also in terms of the formal and informal labor of recruiting and retaining other students of color, work that universities often outsource to students.

The analytic of student debt opens possibilities for comparative, transna-tional, and global critical thinking and action. This is suggested by another party scene, from a film, about campus life called Higher Learning.

John Singleton’s Higher Learning was loosely based on his years as a screen-writing student at USC, but it was filmed at UCLA and set at the fictional Co-


lumbus University.37 Higher Learning was released in 1995, in the wake of the Rodney King rebellions and at about the same time as the founding of what would become the Department of American Studies and Ethnicity at USC, and just five years

before Elena Martinez arrived on campus. Ice Cube’s character, a radical col-lege student named “Fudge,” envisions a world already dominated by finance capital and cashing out in terms of student debt. In the conference theme, we raised questions about how debt shapes or mediates relationships between the global South and North, and to what extent strategies first deployed in the South have subsequently been extrapolated among the poor in the North. Such a periodization is supported by the history of Chile, where the neoliberal experiment in higher education began with the installation of army officers as administrators in ways that anticipate the recent renewed militarization of US campuses and the appointment of former US military leaders to positions as university teachers and administrators.38 But representations such as Higher Learning also suggest an expanded historical frame for understanding austerity measures in the North and South not as successive but as overlapping and in many ways convergent projects.

Such a historical framework is suggested by Edufactory, “a transnational collective engaged with the transformations of the global university and con-flicts in knowledge production.” Its website “collects and connects theoretical investigations and reports from university struggles,” and the network “has organized meetings all around the world, paying particular attention to the

Figure 4.A college student explains finance capital at a dorm party in Higher Learning (1995).


intertwining of student and faculty struggles.” Edufactory also produces a web-based journal of the same name, and in its first issue (January 2010), the editors outlined “the double crisis” produced by contemporary regimes of debt:

the crisis of the university and “the crisis of postfordist conditions of labor and value, many of which are circuited through the university.”39 This double crisis, they stress, is global, and the inaugural issue includes essays about the United States, Africa, Europe, and South America. The contribution to the issue by George Caffentzis about African universities provides a particularly important point of comparison for American studies scholars. He argues that World Bank demands for cuts in African state spending on higher education during the 1980s reproduced neocolonial labor relations. Spending cuts ef-fectively downgraded universities, reproducing Africa’s historically subordinate position in the global economy as a source of resources and cheap labor by further marginalizing Africa in the world patent system and by increasingly training students for manual labor. While the African situation is dramati-cally different from the North American, the history recounted by Caffentzis roughly coincides with the history of cuts in public funding for US higher education in the 1980s and 1990s and the increasingly extensive reproduction of students as flexible workers.

The students in RPM simultaneously demand local representation and redistribution, the latter in the form of divestment from South Africa. In a related way, a critical university studies for American studies helps us under-

Figure 5.Professor Perez delivers to the trustees the student demand that the university divest from South Africa.


stand regimes of student debt as a defining feature of “the imperial university.” This last phrase is from the title of the forthcoming volume The Imperial University: Race, War, and the Nation-State, edited by Sunaina Maira and Piya Chatterjee, which analyzes the imperial dimensions of contemporary struggles over privatizing universities.40 As the editors suggest in the introduction, rather than disinterested bystanders or even by-products of imperialism, contempo-rary US universities are imperial institutions with multiple direct and indirect connections to militarized state power. In the first place, universities police dissent from post-9/11 US imperialism, and the volume includes contribu-tions from scholars who have been at the center of conflicts over academic freedom. In particular, several essays foreground the limits and contradictions of the forms of academic freedom that have been used to sanction student and faculty critics of the US war on terror and of Israel’s occupation of Gaza and the West Bank. The Imperial University persuasively demonstrates that far from being exceptional or marginal, such repression is a normalized and constitutive component of US imperialism. In addition to serving as sites where the cost of dissent is made increasingly high, contemporary universities also produce military weapons and strategies, as well as cultural knowledge about race, na-tion, and religion, which often support US militarism.

Chatterjee and Maira argue that universities are complicit in the history and present reality of US settler colonialism, which shapes, for example, post-9/11 knowledge production but also efforts to limit dissent from the US war on terror and US support for the Israeli occupation of Palestinian territories, including student and faculty calls for boycott, divestment, and sanction. Indeed, the history and present context of US universities overlaps with the history and present context of US settler colonialism in multiple ways. In his remarkable Ebony and Ivy: Race, Slavery, and the Troubled History of America’s Universities, Craig Steven Wilder argues that settler colonialism and slavery were materially and ideologically intertwined with the founding and consolidation of powerful northeastern universities such as Harvard, Yale, Princeton, Dartmouth, and the University of Pennsylvania from the colonial period to the mid early nineteenth century.41Ebony and Ivy demonstrates that colonial universities often served as garrisons helping fortify settlements, while administrators, faculty, and gradu-ates participated in missionary efforts and anti-Indian warfare. Colleges grew by appropriating Indian land and investing in Southern and Caribbean planta-tions. Planters, slavers, and the merchants who profited from slavery served as trustees and were the most important donors in the early history of universities. Northern campuses catered to the white male planter and merchant class for donations and enrollments. The colleges, moreover, were built by Indian and


African slave labor. Owning Indian and African slaves was the norm for the majority of college presidents and for many faculty and students, such that college campuses were often sites of white supremacist violence where slaves were imprisoned, whipped, raped, and tortured. At the same time, universities were invested in the production of racist knowledge purporting to demonstrate white superiority and Black and Indian inferiority.

In all these ways, Wilder’s study suggests that from the colonial era to the mid-nineteenth century, higher education was built on a foundation of settler colonialism and slavery that continues to serve, I would argue, as part of the sedimented conditions of possibility for contemporary universities. A longer genealogy of US universities and settler colonialism would include the establish-ment of Native American boarding schools; the history of racist team mascots and of Indigenous protests against them; university resistance to demands for the repatriation of Indigenous remains; the struggles of Indigenous students, intellectuals, and activists over existing universities and efforts to produce alter-native educational institutions; and finally, of course, the marginalization and indebtedness of contemporary Indigenous college students on US campuses.

To return to The Imperial University, Chatterjee and Maira begin the intro-duction by describing—the first from the perspective of her university office in the United States and the second from Ramallah, Palestine—the heavy-handed police responses to student protests over a 31 percent tuition increase in the University of California, including the widely disseminated images of a campus police officer pepper spraying peaceful protestors. Which raises the question: what is the relationship between the disciplining of campus dissent by settler colonial militarism, on the one hand, and the disciplinary force of student debt, on the other?

In distinct yet not unrelated ways, both student debt and the occupation of Palestinian territories cut to the heart of articulations of a right to education, or more broadly what Harney and Moten call “study,” a practice of collective thought and social activity irreducible to and in fact antagonistic to market logics. This point was partly suggested by a recent contribution to American Quarterly by Rana Sharif titled “The Right to Education: La Frontera to Gaza.” Sharif ’s essay was part of a forum based on a teach-in at USC organized by David Lloyd and Laura Pulido to consider “the connections and differences between the struggles of the Chicana/o and Palestinian peoples.” Sharif notes that the “cartography” of the Israeli occupation, with its “fragmentation of land due to borders, checkpoints, barricades, and the apartheid wall,” limits Palestin-ian students’ access to education. The wall, for example, blocks the path of 36 percent of students at Al-Quds University and prevents about 15,740 students


from reaching their schools, while over 90 percent of An-Najah University students report missing classes because of checkpoint delays. Palestinian stu-dents are also often harassed and detained for their campus organizing efforts. Finally, Sharif argues that the educational system in the occupied territories often elides knowledge about Palestinian history and culture: “The systematic denial by Israel of the histories of the expulsion of Palestinians from their homes, the fate of the refugees, and the destruction of Palestinian villages, amounts to an attempt at eradicating any cohesive Palestinian identity.” The material obliteration of Palestine is thus complemented by its ideological erasure in education. Sharif draws on the work of Birzeit University’s “Right to Education Campaign,” and the story titles on their website provide a concise taxonomy of how the occupation blocks Palestinian education: “Students in Detention”; “Closure of Educational Institutions”; “The Wall’s Impact on Education”; and “Incursions and Attacks” on Palestinian schools and universities. Their website also reports on how the Israeli blockade of Gaza has financially devastated both universities and students, who have increasingly gone into debt. Finally, Birzeit’s website features notices of boycott, divestment, and sanctions (BDS) endorsements from non-Palestinian student groups focused on the abolition of student debt. The student-led BDS movement on college campuses could thus also be described as part of a broader effort to take some control over the student debt financing of settler colonial violence.

At the end of Sleep Dealer, a migrant worker, a dissident drone pilot, and an indebted former college student collaborate in the destruction of a corporate-financed and state-protected dam that has privatized the “common” resource of water. In this way, the film represents a speculative vision of debt abolition. This drawing by Alberto Ledesma called “Berkeley Dreamers” is also a specu-lative vision of debt abolition, but one that radically reimagines architectures of privatization.

The image represents UC Berkeley’s Sather Gate, a landmark designating the entrance to the center of campus that is prominently featured in official university representations as well as in numerous Hollywood films, including, most recently, Monster U. The gate is named for early Berkeley trustee and wealth banker Peder Sather, whose widow, Jane Sather, donated a portion of her fortune to pay for it and the campus’s clock tower. “Berkeley Dreamers,” however, displaces Sather Gate’s namesake with icons representing models of critical thinking and social solidarity beyond the logic of debt, including figures from within and without the university such as Carlos Bulosan, June Jordan, Barbara Christian, Ron Takaki, Martin Luther King Jr., and Frida


Kahlo. Whereas regimes of debt presuppose an iron logic in which yesterday’s debt is inevitably due

tomorrow, “Berkeley Dreams” combines the living and the dead in ways that short-circuit debt’s linear temporality.

Together, Sleep Dealer and “Berkeley Dreamers” are dialectical images that mark the challenges for American studies of moving between a dismantling of the university as a site of domination and its radical revision as a sustaining place of study and possibility. At one and the same time the university has been a key institution of racialized and gendered settler colonial capitalism and a site of transformative critical thinking and practice. For the foreseeable future, then, universities continue to ground conflict and contestation over debt and the violence it finances, as well as critical projections of different and better worlds beyond debt. As my experience discussing Salt of the Earth suggests, classrooms and other university spaces simultaneously reproduce regimes of debt and sustain critical thought and action against debt. And as centers of debt, universities can help organize broad collective dissent, since debt in its many forms is common to everyone but the most privileged.

As places where capitalism and state military and police power come together so powerfully, universities can potentially link and be linked to solidarities across

Figure 6.“Berkeley Dreamers” (2013), by Alberto Ledesma.


social differences. This is indirectly suggested by “The Berkeley Dreamers,” a reference to a movement of undocumented youth taking direct action against deportation and exclusion from citizenship rights. While Damian Vergara, a former UCSD ethnic studies undergraduate and current Yale American studies graduate student, argues that the Dreamers’ focus on undocumented college students risks reinforcing a binary between deserving and undeserving undocumented youth, the movement has nonetheless helped support wide-ranging political solidarities involving students and nonstudents. This is sug-gested by the prominence of Dreamers in protests over the militarization of US social space in general and on college campuses in particular, most notably in protests against the recent appointment of Janet Napolitano as president of the University of California. In addition to BDS and undocumented student movements, I would add movements for university divestment from sweatshops and the private prison industry to the list of important efforts to reenvision the university.

Finally, I find sustenance in the Strike Debt movement, represented earlier today at the event “Occupy Theory, Occupy Strategy: An Assembly on Debt, Race, and Neo-liberalism.” An offshoot of the Occupy movement, Debt Strike aims to abolish all forms of debt, including student debt. Its slogan, “you are not a loan”—speaks out against the individualizing drive of regimes of debt with their basis in capitalist shame. To paraphrase from the program, Strike Debt assemblies are not simply places for the scholarly analysis of debt; they also provide a supportive environment for participants to speak out about their own debt situations and collectively discuss actions that might be taken to resist debt. Abolish debt, abolish prisons, abolish empire—these imperatives form the immediate dream work for our academic institutions. That is to say, our hopes and desires for knowledge and justice will depend on our abilities to turn imperial universities into schools of abolition.

Notes1. Rohit Choppa, “Student Debt Swells, Federal Loans Now Top a Trillion,” Consumer Financial Protec-

tion Bureau, July 17, 2013, www.consumerfinance.gov/newsroom/student-debt-swells-federal-loans-now-top-a-trillion/. When private student debt is added, the total US student debt is $1.2 trillion.

2. Jeffrey J. Williams, “Debt Education: Bad for the Young, Bad for America,” Dissent (Summer 2006), www.dissentmagazine.org/article/debt-education-bad-for-the-young-bad-for-america. The withdrawal of state and federal support for higher education over the last several decades has driven dramatic tuition increases and hence student debt, which now exceeds credit card debt. A 2013 study found that at 514 colleges in the United States, a student is more likely to default on his or her loans than


graduate. See Andrew Gillen, “In Debt and in the Dark: It’s Time for Better Information on Student Loan Defaults,” Education Sector, July 2013, www.educationsector.org/sites/default/files/publications/Defaults_CYCT-F_JULY.pdf.

3. Cedric J. Robinson, Black Marxism: The Making of the Black Radical Tradition (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1983), 3.

4. Cedric J. Robinson, Forgeries of Memory and Meaning: Blacks and the Regimes of Race in the American Theater and Film before World War II (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2007).

5. While not the only way in which influential ideas about universities are circulated, film and media about higher education have powerfully represented its possibilities and limits for modern mass audi-ences, the majority of whom do not study or work at a university. Representations of the university form their own cinematic genre, “the college film,” which is composed of hundreds of examples, from The Freshman to Monster’s U. Film and media studies are also long-standing components of college curriculums, shaping how students and faculty experience and cognitively make universities. See Dana Polan, Scenes of Instruction: The Beginnings of the U.S. Study of Film (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2007). Ronald Reagan played a college student in two films (Knute Rockne, All American [1940], Santa Fe Trail [1940]) and a professor in two more (Bedtime for Bonzo [1951], She’s Working Her Way through College [1952]) before becoming governor of California, clamping down on student antiwar protests at UC Berkeley, firing Angela Davis from UCLA, and dramatically raising tuition. Similarly, Arnold Schwarzenegger played a college professor (Junior [1994]) before becoming California governor and attacking labor studies in the UC system and presiding over massive cuts in state spending for education.

6. http://ethnicstudies.ucsd.edu/_files/syllabi/SP10-ETHN-189-Y-Espiritu.pdf 9 (accessed January 1, 2014).

7. Curtis Marez, “The University of California in Popular Media,” Critical Commons, www.criticalcom-mons.org/Members/cmarez/lectures/lecture.2013-01-07.2328475602 (accessed January 1, 2014).

8. RPM (dir. Stanley Kramer, 1970) (Culver City, CA: Sony Pictures Home Entertainment, 2011), DVD.9. “More Movie Memories,” Pacific Review, www.pacific.edu/Documents/marketing/review/letters.pdf

(accessed January 1, 2014).10. Jeffrey J. Williams, “Deconstructing Academe: The Birth of Critical University Studies,” Chronicle

of Higher Education, February 19, 2012, http://chronicle.com/article/An-Emerging-Field-Decon-structs/130791/.

11. Marc Bousquet, How the University Works: Higher Education and the Low-Wage Nation (New York: New York University Press, 2008); Michele A. Massé and Katie J. Hogan, Over Ten Million Served: Gendered Service in Language and Literature Workplaces (Albany: State University of New York, 2010); Christopher Newfield, Unmaking the Public University: The Forty-Year Assault on the Middle Class (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2011); Williams, “Debt Education,” and “Student Debt and the Spirit of Indenture,” Dissent, Fall 2008, www.dissentmagazine.org/article/student-debt-and-the-spirit-of-indenture.

12. Noliwe Rooks, White Money/Black Power: The Surprising History of African American Studies and the Crisis of Race and Higher Education (Boston: Beacon, 2006); Roderick A. Ferguson, The Reorder of Things: The University and Its Pedagogies of Minority Difference (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2012); Stefano Harney and Fred Moten, The Undercommons: Fugitive Planning and Black Study (New York: Minor Compositions, 2013); Grace Hong, “The Future of Our Worlds: Black Feminism and the Politics of Knowledge in the University under Globalization,” Meridians 8.2 (2008): 425–45; Jodi Melamed, Represent and Destroy: Rationalizing Violence in the New Racial Capitalism (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2011); Gabriella Gutiérrez y Muhs, Yolanda Flores Niemann, Carmen G. González, and Angela P. Harris, eds., Presumed Incompetent: The Intersections of Race and Class for Women in Academia (Salt Lake City: Utah State University Press, 2012); Piya Chatterjee and Sunaina Maira, eds., The Imperial University: Academic Repression and Scholarly Dissent (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2014).

13. Salt of the Earth (dir. Herbert J. Biberman, 1954) (New York: Organa LLC, 1999), DVD.14. As Amanda Armstrong, a Berkeley graduate student and antiprivatization activist, writes, “Debt carries

a gravitational force, which draws students on into futures subordinated to its imperatives. . . . giving them less time for organizing strikes, and other uneconomic activities.” “Universities initiate students,” she claims, “into years of future indebtedness, thus closing them off from the temporal substance of their present and future lives” (“Debt and the Student Strike: Antagonisms in the Sphere of Social


Reproduction,” Reclamations Blog, June 4, 2012, www.reclamationsjournal.org/issue06_armstrong.html).

15. Sleep Dealer (dir. Alex Rivera, 2008) (Los Angeles: Maya Entertainment, 2009), DVD. The plot of Homeland (2013), Corey Doctorow’s popular young adult hacker novel, begins when its protagonist is forced to drop out of college to avoid greater and greater levels of debt, while the influential technol-ogy and culture blog that Doctorow coedits, Boing Boing, regularly reports on student debt. The plot of the novella Lunar Braceros 2125–2148 (2009) by Rosaura Sanchez and Beatrice Pita also focuses on university students in debt. Transnational corporations rule the future world represented in Lunar Braceros, and California’s San Joaquin Valley has been turned into a giant work camp warehousing the homeless and the unemployed. Corporations recruit work-camp students with aptitudes in math and science for their universities, and the novella focuses on a Chicana student from the camp who is compelled to accept a dangerous, low-wage waste disposal job in space to pay her family members’ debts and free them from the camp.

16. Alex Rivera, The Reeler, January 23, 2008, www.thereeler.com/sundance_features/alex_rivera_sleep_dealer.php.

17. Alex Rivera, e-mail to the author, September 9, 2013.18. Brandon A. Jackson and John R. Reynolds, “The Price of Opportunity: Race, Student Loan Debt,

and College Achievement,” Sociological Inquiry 83.3 (2013): 356. The consequences of student debt for Black students and parents is compounded by the subprime housing crisis, which resulted in a doubling of the gap between Black and white wealth such that, in 2009, Black families possessed only $1 of wealth for every $19 owned by white families. Keeping in mind that wealth is calculated by subtracting debt from total assets, we can see how student debt further expands already extreme disparities in wealth, and even more tightly ties the life chances of Black people to ongoing histories of US racism (Jeannette Wicks-Lim, “The Great Recession in Black Wealth,” January 19, 2012, www.peri.umass.edu/fileadmin/pdf/other_publication_types/commentaries/columns_46_Jan19_12.pdf ).

19. In the words of the lawsuit, “through its concealed relationships with (for profit) colleges having high minority populations and its discriminatory underwriting policies and practices, Sallie Mae steered Plaintiffs into substandard private student loans because of their race” (Sasha Rodriguez and Cathelyn Gregoire vs. Sallie Mae Corporation, US District Court of Connecticut, December 17, 2007, www.newamerica.net/files/sallie%20mae%20lawsuit.pdf ).

20. Stephen Burd, “The Subprime Student Loan Racket,” Washington Monthly, November–December 2009, www.washingtonmonthly.com/features/2009/0911.burd.html; Mandi Woodruff, “For-Profit Colleges Are Looking Sketchier Than Ever,” Business Insider, August 20, 2013, www.businessinsider.com/career-education-corp-will-pay-9-million-to-students-after-allegedly-inflating-job-numbers-2013-8; “A.G. Schneiderman Announces Groundbreaking $10.25 Million Dollar Settlement with For-Profit Education Company That Inflated Job Placement Rates to Attract Students,” Office of New York Attorney General Eric T. Schneiderman, www.ag.ny.gov/press-release/ag-schneiderman-announces-groundbreaking-1025-million-dollar-settlement-profit (accessed January 30, 2014).

21. Armstrong, “Debt and the Student Strike.” See also a recent American Association of University Women study, “Graduating to a Pay Gap: The Earnings of Women and Men One Year after Graduation,” www.aauw.org/files/2013/02/graduating-to-a-pay-gap-the-earnings-of-women-and-men-one-year-after-college-graduation.pdf (accessed January 24, 2014).

22. Bousquet, How the University Works, 27.23. Ibid., 6.24. Ibid., 86.25. Gauri Viswanathan, “The Naming of Yale College: British Imperialism and American Higher Edu-

cation,” in Cultures of US Imperialism, ed. Amy Kaplan and Donald E. Pease (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1993), 90, 92.

26. In Fenton, Missouri, for example, a two-hour drive east of the University of Missouri in Columbia (which is itself named for Christopher Columbus), Walmart leveled two ancient burial mounds, expos-ing human remains to looters, to build a new superstore. See “Sacred Lands: Walmart’s Relationship with Native Americans,” http://walmartwatch.com/wp-content/blogs.dir/2/files/pdf/native_ameri-cans_fact_sheet.pdf (accessed October 13, 2013). See also Sue Sturgis, “Wal-Mart’s History of De-stroying Sacred Sites,” Facing South, Institute for Southern Studies, www.southernstudies.org/2009/09/wal-marts-history-of-destroying-sacred-sites.html (accessed January 23, 2014).


27. John Stossel, “Big Cheats on Campus,” ABC News, November 19, 2004, http://abcnews.go.com/2020/story?id=264646&page=1.

28. Quoted in Stossel, “Big Cheats on Campus.” 29. Dan Glaister, “University Uproar over Heiress Who ‘Cheated,’” Guardian, November 30, 2004, www.

theguardian.com/world/2004/nov/30/usa.internationaleducationnews.30. Ibid. 31. “Woman Meets with USC Officials to Discuss College Cheating Scandal Involving Paige Laurie,” KSDK

News, Los Angeles, December 4, 2004, http://archive.ksdk.com/news/local/story.aspx?storyid=71083. 32. “Elena Martinez Talks about Paige Laurie Cheating Scandal,” KSDK News, Los Angeles, November

23, 2004, www.ksdk.com/news/article/70484/0/Elena-Martinez-Talks-About-Paige-Laurie-Cheating-Scandal. Martinez experienced her work for Laurie as disciplinary and coercive. “I thought about quitting a lot of times, but I didn’t know how,” she told 20/20. “I was dealing with someone really powerful” (quoted in Stossel, “Big Cheats on Campus”). As she explained to a local TV reporter, “when you’re dealing with such an entity, as big as what I’m dealing with, I definitely feel like I’ve got to be cautious.” So when she resolved to come forward and reveal her work for Laurie, she decided she needed to discuss it with her family for their own “safety” (“Elena Martinez Talks about Paige Laurie Cheating Scandal,” KSDK News). It remains unclear whether the big “entity” she feared is the Walmart family, the USC Trojan family, or both.

33. Melamed, Represent and Destroy, 145.34. See Marc Bousquet, “Students Are Already Workers,” in How the University Works, 125–56.35. Ferguson, Reorder of Things, 8. Similarly, Newfield suggests that while hunger strikes at UC Santa

Barbara and UCLA in the early 1990s by students demanding more resources for Chicano studies briefly focused attention on questions of inequality, in the same years the institutionalization of multiculturalism and norms of abstract formal inclusion coincided with the largely successful culture war attacks on teaching and research about race that supported student demands for redistribution (Unmaking the Public University, 1–2).

36. Ferguson, Reorder of Things, 9.37. Higher Learning (dir. John Singleton, 1995) (Culver City, CA: Columbia Tristar Home Entertainment,

2001), DVD.38. Miguel Carmona and Nicolás Slachevsky, “The Double Crisis of the Chilean University,” Edufac-

tory Web Journal, Zero Issue, January 2010, 91. Examples of military and government officials with university posts include Janet Napolitano, who was recently appointed president of the University of California but who presided over a record number of deportations while director of Homeland Security; former director of the CIA General David Petraeus, who has lectured at CUNY and USC; former British prime minister Tony Blair, who has taught courses on faith and globalization at Yale University; former US secretary of state Condoleezza Rice, currently Business School Faculty and director of Center for Global Business and the Economy at Stanford University; and torture apologist Alberto Gonzales, who has taught a political science course and served as a diversity recruiter at Texas Tech University and who currently holds the Doyle Rogers Distinguished Chair of Law at Belmont University, in Nashville, Tennessee.

39. Edufactory Collective, “The Double Crisis: Living on the Borders,” Edufactory Web Journal, Zero Issue, January 2010, 4–5.

40. Sunaina Maira and Piya Chatterjee, eds., The Imperial University: Race, War, and the Nation-State (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2014).

41. Craig Steven Wilder, Ebony and Ivy: Race, Slavery, and the Troubled History of America’s Universities (New York: Bloomsbury, 2013).

Seeing in the Red: Looking at Student Debt

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