Thursday, April 15, 2010

Higher Learning






And we thought the days when college students raised hell were long gone: Today, student activists speaking out on racism on campus, affordable education and access to higher-ed as part of immigration reform are making us think twice.

Welcome to the Ivory Tower Inc. where the capitalist machine is alive and well and knowledge is sold to the highest bidder. Since higher education is mostly privatized and run like a corporate business universal access is non existent. The U.S. is one of the only self-proclaimed democratic systems with a privatized system of higher education that an overwhelming part of it's population cannot even afford and where most are inevitably sucked into a seemingly endless system of loan payments. Not only is access an enormous issue, but the millions of dollars funneled into both the military and prison industrial-complex under which our great nation operates (specializing in the incarceration of men of color-- there are more black men in prison than there are in college(1)) is also obliterating any chance for comprehensive education reform. A nationwide movement for lowering loan rates for higher education and just bringing down the price tag of higher ed both public and private is a growing agenda for students.

Issues around immigration status and documentation in higher education inspired both undocumented students and their allies in Chicago to start a lobbying and advocacy campaign for the DREAM Act. The DREAM Act, if adopted would become part of comprehensive immigration reform. The Act would allow undocumented students the ability to go to colleges and universities with access to financial aid.
Thousands of students from schools across the country marched in a rally in Washington D.C. on March 20th to pressure Congress to pass the DREAM Act.

Race and class are still monster issues and not just in more conservative institutions. No matter how many nouveau self-proclaimed progressive liberals we keep turning out, spaces are still limited and microagressions (definition: people usually think of racism with a big bold red 'R' paired with burning crosses in the mud. But today, racism is commonly more insidious, less bold, more underhanded and most people when hit with today's racism are left standing thinking "What the hell just happened?") occur every day. Our increasing inability to talk about race and class in this country and in our schools and jumping straight to equally problematic models of egalitarianism and colorblindness is causing major tensions on college campuses. "Ghetto" themed parties or nooses hanging from quad trees may not seem like crosses burning in the mud-- but really, they might as well be.

Our dominant model of multiculturalism with it's "happy, happy let's hold hands, dish out colorful food, fun and festivities and pretend that we're not struggling, pretend that we're not being tokenized, pretend that we're not being appropriated" vision of society and cultural space is not the way to transformative change. Multiculturalism and it's post-modern heir "color blindness" has divided communities of color on a national level, but particularly in the microcosm that are institutions of higher learning. Students from under represented communities (communities of color, queer and working class communities) struggle to effectively work together and form proactive coalitions against systems of institutionalized oppression from curriculum and pedagogy all the way down to student groups and organizing.

College campuses in the U.S. have historically been sites for social action and change. Students have marched, protested, organized and mobilized in the thousands against war, racism, sexism and labor among a litany of other social justice issues.

But this isn't 1968, this is 2010 and college students are (hopefully) gearing up and ready for a fight.



(1)About 10.4% of the entire African-American male population in the United States aged 25 to 29 is incarcerated, by far the largest racial or ethnic group—by comparison, 2.4% of Hispanic men and 1.2% of white men in that same age group were incarcerated. According to a report by the Justice Policy Institute in 2002, the number of black men in prison has grown to five times the rate it was twenty years ago. Today, more African-American men are in jail than in college. In 2000 there were 791,600 black men in prison and 603,032 enrolled in college. In 1980, there were 143,000 black men in prison and 463,700 enrolled in college.

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