American Universities do not care about Social Justice

American Universities are impartial to the injustices that plague are societies. Although it can be comforting for a college president to send mass emails about how we should grieve George Floyd, or that they are a sanctuary school that will protect undocumented students- American Universities actually do nothing to help change our societal ills.

I recently graduated from the Colin Powell School at CUNY’s City College. Yes- I know. It is already not a great start to name a college after a secretary of state who deceived the American people to go to war with Saddam Hussein, costing tens of thousands of innocent lives. However, I always felt my political science education was well rounded, and my professors committed to actually delving into complex ideological issues.

Yet there was a clear divergence from what I learned in the classroom, and what I witnessed outside of it. How is it that I learned about America’s military industrial complex only to go downstairs and see ROTC recruitment tables? Or learning about the invasion of Vietnam and Iraq, only to see the president advertising events with Colin Powell and Henry Kissinger?

Every American University seemingly preaches critical thinking and, even more recently as our country faces a stark political divide, our institutions want us to engage with issues of identity, diversity and systemic racism. They are less likely, however, to look inward and identify the systemic racism embedded in their own institutions.

The City University of New York (CUNY), which encompases a conglomerate of colleges and institutions under its name across New York, has a history of silencing social justice movements and activists. Students advocating for Palestinian human rights for example, face numerous bureaucratic barriers that university officials routinely erect to hamper student organizing.

An event I organized with Israeli human rights activist Miko Peled, an event I submitted months in advance, was suddenly canceled by the City College administration in 2018 under the pretext that it was “too controversial.” It was only until my student group, Students for Justice in Palestine, contacted a group of lawyers, did the event get reinstated as it violated our first amendment rights. We received no apology from the administration.

“Any student group that’s organizing an event particularly around this issue of Israel and Palestine has to go through a bureaucratic maze of regulations,” explained Brooklyn College professor Corey Robin. “They are written down but they are so complicated and so lengthy that I, who have a PhD from Yale, have an extraordinarily difficult time making sense of them.”

In 2013, City College shut down an organizing center in their main building, called the Guillermo Morales/Assata Shakur Student and Community Center. To student organizers, this space was used as a meeting space for various minority groups such as women’s rights groups, community organizations and others to make common cause. Yet, with just a day to go before midterm exams, the center was shut down overnight with no warning. The administration’s justification for the takeover was that it was, “a matter of space.”

“The CUNY administration is really scared of a lot of the organizing and community-building coming out of the building,” said Alyssia Osorio, director of the Morales/Shakur Center. “We provide so many services for the community — know-your-rights training, a farm share that provides healthy food, we’ve run a soup kitchen, we have provided babysitting services for people in the community.”

These trends of hampering student organizing can be seen throughout the country. A study conducted by the Protest Policy Project and Charles H.F. Davis III, found that policies adopted by numerous universities, namely University of Wisconsin, aimed at “disorderly conduct”, are designed to punish student activists who engage in disruptive protest. Although these anti-protest policies themselves do not explicitly mention racially minoritized student activities, findings from the Higher Education Research Institute detail that student activists from minority backgrounds are disproportionately likely to participate in protests on campus and beyond. The enforcement and implementation of these policies, therefore, subject racial minorities to higher levels of scrutiny, applicability and punishment.

I believe the blame is the adoption and promotion of neoliberalism in higher education. The ideological approach that favours free market capitalism has plagued American university boards to be more concerned with how to make money, than what’s best for their students and their community. They embrace private gain and economic advancement over advancing the public good. Students are therefore seen as customers rather than agents who have transformative potential.

The commercialization of higher education was once confined to the periphery of campus life: to athletic programs. Now, however, as written by Derek Bok in his book Universities in the Marketplace, money making has overtaken a majority of universities’ goals. Bok writes that universities “lost sight of any clear mission beyond a vague commitment to excellence.” They are instead, “creating a vacuum into which material pursuits have rushed in unimpeded.”

The purpose of American universities has been reduced to a transactional process. Paul E. Bylsma in his article, The Teleological Effect of Neoliberalism on American Higher Education, associates the values of neoliberal ideology to threaten and undermine the essential, non-monetary goals of higher education. The transactional nature that is involved in planning public events with war generals, disgraced statesmen, and CEOs all contributes to the reductive neoliberal policy and discourse. Instead, Bylsma writes, simply investing towards a diploma “is emphasized over the transformational nature of learning towards a community that is based on the vision of social prosperity.”

In their effort for monetary gain, higher institutions sacrifice the values of a holistic society. It took nearly a decade of public pressure, and student organizing which dominated campus politics, for prestigious ivy league, Harvard University, to allow its remaining investments in the fossil fuel industry to expire, paving the way for it to eventually divest from the sector, as they announced a few days ago. 

Yet without groups like Fossil Fuel Divest Harvard, which was founded in 2012, and student activists that staged disruptive protests across campus, Harvard’s prior theoretical commitments to address climate change would have been moot. William E. McKibben, founder of climate campaign group 350.org, and Harvard alum, stated that he thought “Harvard would never divest.” The fact they finally did, he said, “is an enormous tribute to generations of Harvard students who have never let up.”

Students from Harvard however are the lucky ones. Hundreds of colleges and universities across the country, like CUNY, invest in sectors such as fossil fuel industries that contribute further to the destruction of our planet and Israeli military contractors that contribute to the military occupation of Palestinians. Student organizers who challenge these realities are hit with disciplinary hearings and discriminatory policies that stops their advocacy in its tracks. Protecting endowments and solidifying prestige has become the number one priority for the American neoliberal college.

Shifting higher education from a public good to a private asset not only commodifies education, telling students their value is only to be traded and bought in the marketplace, but it also hinders progress and the very values that these institutions claim to strive for.