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It would, I think, be genuinely useful if Chuck Schumer were politically ruined after last week.
There’s a limit to how useful it actually is to direct our energies specifically at elected politicians right now. Politicians aren’t going to save us. BUT: institutional leaders of many stripes (.gov, .edu, .org, and .com alike) are still acting much, much more afraid of the consequences of •fighting• than they are of the consequences of •compliance•.
We can change that. Make compliance ruin some high-profile careers. Make examples out of a few people. Schumer. Newsom. The Columbia admin. Tar and feather them. https://flipboard.com/@vanityfair/top-stories-ur1oga9sz/-/a-CUoIJMw5TYa3em_8zTUjJg%3Aa%3A3195374-%2F0
Speaking of which:
What’s going on at Columbia? What’s the state of the resistance there?
Columbia just •rescinded• degrees they’d granted. This wasn’t even just a politically motived expulsion, which would already be utterly horrifying. They ••revoked diplomas•• already granted.
That means if you get a degree from Columbia, you might suddenly, at the political whim of any random president, not have a degree anymore. All that money you paid, all that work you did? Poof! It can disappear overnight!
Can you imagine?! Can you imagine what that does to the expected value of a Columbia degree??
If I were a prospective student, I would really think twice about accepting an offer from Columbia now. Nope nope nope.
And if I were a current student, an alum, faculty…well, I’d be out for administrators’ heads on pikes (figuratively speaking), because everything I’ve invested in that place is going up in smoke.
An elite college degree is an investment with a payoff horizon of 20 or 40 or 60 years. It’s costly — not just in money, but in time, energy, years of life. People are only willing to invest in it because they believe the investment will endure.
If a Columbia degree is like a cheap roof that might just leak or collapse at any time, what’s their case? “Give us four years of your life, drain your savings, go into debt! Everything you worked for •might not• suddenly collapse!! Our degrees are just cheap paper anyway, right??”
Yes, strategies like this from @jhlibby:
https://newsie.social/@jhlibby/114179160299839205
You don’t even have to sue them out of existence. You just have to make the administration believe that they •could• face a devastating lawsuit.
Make them more afraid of complying with fascists than they are of fighting fascists. Make compliance existentially dangerous.
Absent proven academic fraud, I don't honestly believe it's possible for a university to "revoke" a degree without opening themselves up to a huge civil lawsuit. And, hopefully, those civil lawsuits will manifest.
Aside from that, it's obvious that Ivy League schools are no longer rigorous institutions or capable of fulfilling their missions. I suspect that more and more of the *actually* talented people will choose lib arts alternatives, leaving the Ivy to the legacies.
@johnzajac @jhlibby
I mean, I teach at one of those alternatives that you’re talking about, so you’re singing my tune. But I do not celebrate the destruction of one of the Ivies; we’re all in the one boat here, and if it sinks, it’s cold comfort that the other end is sinking first.
I'm ambivalent about the destruction of these institutions. Higher education in general has been on an unsustainable trajectory for decades, and imo this is just the "cannot be sustained" part of that manifesting.
Also, there's nothing *particularly* special about Ivies that isn't entirely caught up in their faculty and the students they attract. Once the good faculty go somewhere else, the students will follow, and other unis will take their place.
@johnzajac @inthehands Sadly, there are few remaining schools that can offer faculty a sustainable living.
And lest we stray too far down the rabbit hole, I fully realize that the Unis would settle out of court long before they ever got close to taking a judgment against them.
Ah, but keep in mind that the people they're retaliating against are *principled and willing to endure hardship for their values*. They're not rescinding the degrees of like, shoplifters who mooned the President. They're doing it to literal freedom fighters and dissidents who have already put their bodies and futures on the line to stop a genocide.
A lawsuit isn't just about remediation; it's an opportunity to get press for their cause and highlight Columbia's complicity.
@johnzajac @jhlibby
I’m highly skeptical of the train of thought in that first paragraph. It’s true, to a very large extent, but the “unsustainability” of higher ed is much like the “unsustainability” of social security: the gap between the real problems and the imagined ones is •vast•, and right-wingers bent on institutional destruction prey on that gap.
What’s actually unsustainable about higher ed is our society’s vast and growing economic inequality: colleges want to remain accessible to people on the low end of the divide, but have to pay people on the “skilled labor” (hate that term) side of the divide. Those two are diverging faster and faster.
This could be an ideological difference, though I don't know where yours lie: I think private education at all levels should be outlawed, and all education should be free.
I strongly believe that the civic state is like herd immunity: if people are allowed to opt out, it will fail. To me, public education is one of the beating hearts of a modern equitable society, and so my criticism comes from that.
@johnzajac @jhlibby It’s an ideological half-difference. I believe education is a human right and something every human being should have access to. It should either be free or, that failing, withing financial reach for absolutely everyone.
I think it’s •extraordinarily• dangerous to concentrate all education under the single umbrella of the state. Too many eggs in one basket. That danger has never been clearer than it is right now: one of the reasons the admin is trying to make an example of Columbia is that the state schools are already rolling over for the fascists with no fuss en masse, and it’s private colleges that have been standing strongest on, say, sticking with their DEI mission.
It’s a miserable tragedy that mechanisms to spread public support to diverse institutions have largely been attempts to destroy the public ones (cf charter schools). I don’t have easy answers. But “outlaw private education” is a dangerous non-answer in my book.
@johnzajac @inthehands That failure stems, to some extent, from the Ivies' legacy traditions that DEI efforts sought to remedy. So there's that.
To the point of lawsuits, I imagine anyone whose degree has been affected could at least sue for a refund of tuition and whatever student loan interest has accumulated. A few successful cases like that should put the fear of god into uni administrations.
One side effect of commercializing education is that once you deliver the product you can't just break into the person's house and take it back because you've decided you don't like them.
I wouldn't be surprised if a lawsuit *both* reinstated the degree AND awarded large damages for the harm. It doesn't help them that universities' greed is on public display and has been for more than a decade.
This feels like "one more nail" to me.