On Jan. 27, academics and thinkers Chris Newfield, Eleni Schirmer, and Jason Wozniak gathered for a panel at Swarthmore’s Intercultural Dome. The event, titled “Degrees, Debt, and the University,” focused on the current financial implications of higher education’s precarious state in the U.S., including their personal experiences with debt and its systematic roots within higher education.
Aydelotte Foundation Senior Associate Director Andy Hines chaired the panel, which served as a companion to “University Keywords,” a recently published book for which Hines was the editor. “University Keywords” includes perspectives from over 30 scholars and organizers, who, as Hines explained, reflect on the “current state of the field of critical university studies but also give us the tools for analysis to build a better university.”
The panelists shared their personal experiences involving higher education and debt, with Newfield describing his own struggles to secure funding at the University of California, Santa Barbara. “The money going into the sciences was an order of magnitude larger than that going into the humanities, and I got really interested about the intellectual effects of that, because some fields never get to move forward.”
As the discussion turned to the origins of formal higher education, Newfield emphasized that the earliest universities were founded to facilitate students’ holistic intellectual growth, rather than solely to prepare them for the workforce: “The point of a degree was that it allowed you to synthesize practical knowledge and liberal knowledge — the two were completely interfused.”
Eleni Schirmer, a freelance journalist and organizer with the Debt Collective, a union for debt collectors, connected the debt crisis in higher education to broader inequity. Schirmer explained that education is one of the social realms that sees the most contradictions between “the way that we are told the world is supposed to work and the way we truly experience it.”
Schirmer described her own encounters with this incongruity during her postgraduate experience at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, as she witnessed education budgets and public sector unions suffering attacks from politicians. “It was not simply political,” Schirmer explained. Even in the absence of governmental antagonism, “universities would still be under pressure to make budget cuts to pay off loans to their creditors.”
This debt, the panelists explained, runs deep. Wozniak shared that when a university is in debt and borrows money, it enfranchises a whole new set of actors, including not only the creditors and insurance companies, but also the rating agency. “It generates this path of characters, all of which are taking a cut of this money.”
The discussion also addressed the Trump Administration’s attempt to outright eliminate university autonomy. “The toleration for the liberal autonomy of intellectuality and academic life is over for the Trumpian,” explained Newfield, pointing to political action targeting recent student protests in support of Palestine.
Schirmer pointed to the strength of these student movements, suggesting that student encampments became the sites of government repression because they were powerful demonstrations of “community solidarity and resistance.”
As the discussion concluded, the panelists illuminated points of power within universities. “More of us are in debt than unionized” — present and future debtors are on our campuses for nine months out of the year, creating a site of potential discourse and organization efforts, Wozniak mentioned. Wozniak also made reference to internal democratization efforts within universities abroad that could be applied to contexts like Swarthmore, while Schirmer mentioned opportunities for bargaining between students and faculty.
Hines pointed out that “University Keywords” was intended to help people recognize problems in universities and thereby empower them to take action in the name of positive change. Through creating spaces for public discourse, he said, panels like “Degrees, Debt, and the University” serve a similar role.
“It’s really easy to look at everything that we all have spelled out and feel extremely depressed about what is possible,” explained Schirmer towards the end of the discussion. “We should not take for granted that we are all in a room together right now having this conversation, it’s actually quite profound.”
