This is an edited version of the presentation given by Florence Oppen at the “Resisting Neoliberal University Conference” held on May 4th, 2018 at San Francisco State University.
What is our vision for public education? If you were to ask me, I would say, as a socialist, that it should be one of a fully funded, universal tuition-free education system from pre K-12 to university. was what the Master Plan in California set out to deliver. An important difference for me would entais getting rid of the stratified and elitist process of selection, which severely restricts who can attend a UC institution.
Of course a true public education system should consist of schools and universities where all workers get living wages and Cost of Living Adjustment (COLA) increases, and it would be a university where we all have publicly-funded pensions. I don’t want to say we will also have ‘good healthcare,’ because I think we should get Single-Payer healthcare for all, as a step towards fully socialized medicine in this country. I think we can afford it.
I also think it would be a university where we would have subsidized housing, for the students, the staff, and the faculty, and free transportation. We also should have free meals served in the universities (not only the schools), because, imagine the situation we have today, one of the main demands of the students in our campus at SFSU is food insecurity, 48% of the students in our university are food insecure.
We cannot, however, limit our vision of public education to securing and expanding the material needs and conditions that allow us to have an education. I think what some of our colleagues in Ethnic Studies, in Women and Gender Studies, and some of us who are Socialists, radical thinkers, and activists, what we are trying to discuss, when we combat neoliberalism, is to change our relation to the knowledge and to the content we study. And it’s not just about adding a new section to your syllabus, including the experiences and theorizations of other regions of the world; it is about changing your relation to knowledge and to people. A truly enlightening and emancipatory public education has to do with changing our relation to the experience of the ‘Other’ from which we are alienated on a daily basis, because we are “othered” every day from each other. It means acquiring the means to understand and transform our social relations, changing our relation with each other. That is the only reason why some of us came to teach at a job in a public institution.
The first thing we need to change to have our vision of public education prevail, is the question the instrumental conception of knowledge; the one that is presupposed by our public education system today. It’s kind of depressing when you get your new job at San Francisco State and you go to the faculty orientation, the best things the administrators have to tell you is the rate of output and input, and those charts with goals we need to meet, all the “BAs” we need to produce every year, and now their concern about how to best measure our ‘added value’ to the students. Students are not things or products you can add value too, they are people like us. In the neoliberal phase, all of this economic, productivity and managerial language has permeated with no resistance into the practice and activity of education, which for us has nothing to do with production. But the problem is what is behind this language: that students come to class not to learn or discover anything but to earn “credits”, and when they reach 120 units they have “earned” their degree. What we do in the classroom, the economic forces that have gained control of our universities could not care less. What matters is the number of units, the number of students we teach, the student-credit-hour ratio, that is to say the amount of revenue we bring in, and again, the best way to “assess” everything we do. And then the students get the message that they come here to get a degree in order to find a job. This instrumental conception of learning empties knowledge of its experiential dimension, this quantification force flattens the experience of learning some of us are trying every day to enhance, by giving depth and a critical dimension. To some degree, given the alien forces that govern education, it is sometimes good our managers do not care too much about what actually happens in the classroom to be very honest. For the moment, let’s keep it this way. Some of us try to have a different relation with knowledge, that is a transformative relation with knowledge. What we try to share with the students is that “it’s not what I’m going to accumulate or acquire, or how am I going to get richer coming to class”, but it’s about, “how will I become transformed through education, how am I going to contribute to knowledge”? Knowledge is something we’re going to share together and it’s going to change the way we are, the way we behave in this society.
And then we come to this question of experience. How do we learn to experience or understand how other people experience life? Most of the youth today are mobilized around questions of identity, which usually get belittled or co-opted by neoliberal projects. We often hear the disappointed comment of older educators, “oh, this is again about identity politics. This youth doesn’t care about real politics.” But the question of identity is a central political educational question, because if treated properly it is about how our identities are socially constructed. Is our identity something that is given by birth, that is assigned to us, or is that something that is socially formed through key experiences and by key institutions, and the class, gender, and race relations we are born into? How are our identities crafted, created, and shared throughout society? Are all our identities produced the same way? What are the structures in this society, what are the institutions, what are the ways that reproduce these identities? That’s what the College of Ethnic Studies (COES) and the department of Women and Gender Studies, for example, are set up to do, but this is what we should do in all departments. Those departments were created not just to produce new knowledge, they were set up to teach all of us, critically, how to relate to our own identities, to our own experiences, and how to start relating differently to the experience of each other.
Unfortunately, the way neoliberalism is set up, it destroys our education by pitting faculty in competition with each other (now student evaluation averages are measured and compared to others), and also forces departments to compete for funding. This is the logic used to defund the College of Ethnic Studies. When COES faculty demand to get their cut-funding restored, the administration tells the other faculty that all of the hiring lines that will go to that College will not go to their own departments, and such is the eternal litany of “department nationalism”, which discipline is more important?, etc.. It’s absurd. The same is done through pitting students against faculty, when we hear the top administrator say, “if we give a wage increase to the faculty, student fees will have to go up”, etc..
While defeating neoliberalism, we should also start thinking differently about the project of education, which is the project of how we change how we relate to each other. The undoing of the neoliberalization and corporatization of public education requires achieving some reforms. For example, like, we cannot really take seriously the experience of our students on this campus if we don’t reverse Prop 209, which has banned affirmative action in all public institutions in California. Let’s remembers that affirmative action was a conquest of the Black Power movement. We need free college for all, but we also need to reverse Prop 209, and start aggressively recruiting through affirmative action, so the population that comes to our public universities, from the Community Colleges to the UC, reflects the population of the people who live and work in California.
And also we need to critically examine the role of the class system in our society and how our economy is structured, and for that we need our colleagues in social science, political economy to provide us the necessary critical tools to understand it. A critical public education is also one that puts class at the center and transforms our relation to class. When we go in the morning to pick up our coffee in the Cafe 101, or when we talk to our colleagues or staff, we are talking to fellow exploited brothers and sisters. However, many times faculty members treat staff as if they were their boss, because either they consciously think they are different (they are “professionals”) or because they are completely oblivious to class. So I think the role of education is also to undo the way we are trained to treat the Other as a servant, as an employee, someone who doesn’t have needs, feelings, problems. That’s also the kind of social education we need to be developing in our University.
Finally we need to change the social relations we create in the classroom through education, because the classroom can function as a microcosm of society, and pedagogical relations are also social political relations. Actually the public education system is set up to reproduce a set of relations or to socialize us in a certain way, so we “function” better in a capitalist, racist and sexist society. The number one relation we are socialized through is competition, is rivalry. We are socialized in a scenario of scarcity, where we are told that there is not enough for everybody, so you’ve got to run, get your goods and get out, right? It’s Social Darwinism in the classroom. And that’s the way we are forced to evaluate our students. This is what happens when you grade on a curve, everybody is competing with everybody, the number of As, Bs or Cs are set in advance – not that the other “objective” summative methods of grading are any better, though.
This is why it is very important to introduce relations of cooperation and collaboration into the classroom, between the students themselves, and between the students and faculty. Not just to have fun, but to learn. One of the most terrifying, and then hilarious experience with my students is when they come to class and I say we have a pop quiz today. Then they think, “oh no, I’m going to get evaluated, I will fail, I did not study”, etc.. And so you see the fear in their faces when you say “pop quiz”. And then you know, I let them suffer for 5 minutes and then I say, “well I think we have a misunderstanding here: by “pop quiz”, I meant popular quiz”. “What do you mean popular quiz?” they ask, “well, I mean that you now have 10 minutes to figure out together as a class how to fill out these questions.” And then suddenly, the classroom changes. There’s no longer this shame, fear, competition. It’s not the “make it or break it” of everyday life, and the panic of not making it. Students start talking and sharing, and thinking together, and being generous with each other, and they often argue over the answers and have to reason them. ‘What do you put here? Why did you put that? Are you sure, what is the rule for that?” And they figure it out together. And they realize how much smarter we are together as a society when we learn together, when we are generous with each other, when we collaborate together across class lines, gender lines, race lines. How much better is the experience of learning when it is not competition and rivalry and ranking and grades and all of this. This is also the kind of public education they want. We cannot do that all of the time, of course, but we learn how to do it well, so students prepare in a very different manner for the test.
This education is not possible in a climate of fear. And this is why I think that some of the concerns my colleagues and students are bringing here today, that a campus that is severely policed, where you don’t know if ICE can come tomorrow to arrest or deport you or your family -r you don’t know if tomorrow you can just be attacked in any way – that is not a conducive climate for education. You need trust and you need solidarity. You need to know that when the ICE officer knocks on the door, all of the class has pre-figured a plan not to open the door, and nobody’s going to leave the room, and nobody’s going to let the officer enter.
But also, what is maybe the most outrageous thing of what is happening in our University, is this attack to academic freedom. The attacks by the Zionist groups to Prof. Abdulhadi and other scholars are putting all of us in a climate of fear, where we need to watch every word we utter, especially with controversial topics like Palestine, “illegal” immigration, police brutality or the foreign politics of the US government. If faculty and students are afraid to speak their mind, within the respective and inclusive moral and intellectual ground rules we owe to each other, we cannot genuinely teach and the students cannot learn. And if we don’t stop this, there is no possible future for education or the University.
The last thing I want to say is that we also need to reimagine the relation of the University with its outside. We have this idea that we are the experts because we have PhDs and degrees and we need to teach the “Other”, and the “Other” doesn’t know. We need to abandon the assumption that students come “uneducated”, and we teach them and they are “educated”. That’s not the way it works. I say that because I have had the chance of having spent 12 years of my life in higher education, getting degrees from very prestigious universities, and I have to say that most of the important things I learned, including conceptual ones, I didn’t learn them in school. I learned them in the social struggle, the class war. I learned them with my comrades, with my friends, with my colleagues through experience, practice, reading groups, reflective sessions, etc. And I’m not saying this to be this populist professor that says ‘burn the university,’ ‘fuck the university;’ I’m not saying that. I’m saying that the only condition of learning in a society like ours, that is deeply divided along class lines, and also along racial and gender lines, that is a militaristic society, is to have one foot inside and one foot outside the University.
This is because the university as an institution is not alien to this exploitative society, but rather in the knowledge it is set up to produce, through its social relations and organization, it is an expression of a capitalist society. This is why you need one foot outside, because you need a sounding board to realize if the education you are providing inside the University is truly transformative for working people, if it is advancing justice and the cause of humanity. And if you do not teach your students to have one foot inside and one foot outside, they will not learn. Because the big engine for learning, for emancipatory learning, what really motivates us to learn, is to resist and fight for what we need, and to imagine what we would like to have. It’s resistance and desire. And if we don’t bring back resistance and desire to education, which is actually what most of us in the humanities try to do, right?, it’s not worth having a public education, because without desire and resistance or struggle we will never learn and change ourselves.