This past year in the U.S., a new chapter in class struggle has been written. Students, many from the Palestinian diaspora, anti-Zionist Jewish people, leftists, and people of conscience of all stripes have stood up against the genocide in Gaza. They have built encampments and questioned universities that run like businesses with investments in Israel. They have faced off the repression of university administrators while unmasking the imperialist character of both the Democrats and Republicans in office who help to send the police to beat up students and workers. 

　　At the root of the exploitative, authoritarian, and ideological characteristics of the modern university is the fact that universities are ultimately dominated by the interests of the capitalist class. Institutions of higher education, especially the elite universities, reproduce the dominant ideology while producing science, research, and knowledge in the interests of the capitalist class. Further, through the purchase of bonds and investments in Zionism, fossil fuels, and the military-industrial complex, universities often directly contribute to and help perpetuate a system of capitalist exploitation. And, of course, many universities, including publicly funded state universities, have adopted a business-like model of operating that includes increased tuition, draconian austerity measures, and the hyperexploitation of workers in a tiered labor system. 

　　As a result of the recent movement in solidarity with Palestine, the contradictions of universities under capitalism are becoming more clear. At the same time, tensions are deepening between college administrators, who are subservient to the interests of Wall Street and the bipartisan imperialist regime, and a new generation of students and university workers who are increasingly anti-capitalist and anti-imperialist.As the traditional university model faces exhaustion, the new student and worker movement in higher education has the opportunity to clearly articulate and fight for the type of university we want: one that defends the interests of the working class and oppressed. The struggle for free, public universities — that are organized by and for the working class and the oppressed, where there is academic freedom and freedom of expression, where Marxism is not censored, and where knowledge is put in service of workers and oppressed sectors, also implies fighting in the here and now for basic democratic rights and against the current attacks that limit our ability to fight. 

　　The “Golden Age” of Higher Education under Capitalism 

　　The landscape of higher education in the United States has undergone a profound transformation over the past century. Originally, universities served as elite institutions, accessible only to a privileged few. After World War II, however, when the GI Bill expanded access to higher education for millions of veterans, universities began to be seen as integral to the pursuit of the American dream, and a “passport to the middle class” in the height of postwar prosperity. For the U.S. regime, this professionalized workforce was key to producing cadre for its project of economic expansion at home and abroad.But this kind of education was not equally accessible to all. While many Black Americans served in World War II, the GI Bill exacerbated racial disparities in education. Under segregationist policies, most Southern colleges excluded Black students, while in the North, Black student enrollment was kept purposefully low. Historically Black Colleges received significantly less funding and could not admit all Black students. 

　　The postwar education system was shaped by the Cold War, in which the strategic competition with the Soviet Union was at the center of the national political agenda.it wasn’t just the sciences: language-area studies were also framed as a way to combat communist influence and culture, while also producing skilled and fluent employees for the burgeoning intelligence sector.  

　　Universities were also on the forefront of McCarthyist attacks. From the late 1940s to early 1950s, over 100 academics were fired in a coordinated campaign led by the regime’s apparatuses, like the FBI. The state exerted influence over academia in very explicit ways — leading congressional witch hunts that threatened firings and social excommunications — but it also used the softer pressures of reputational damage, blocking research or professional advancements, and chilling free expression by faculty. In this way, the U.S. ensured that its universities would continue to serve the interests of imperialism during the Cold War. 

　　The 1960s and 1970s marked another pivotal moment in the evolution of higher education. Enrollment in universities nearly tripled during this time; mass universities emerged, with more heterogeneous student bodies. The trend toward including students of color in the university was strengthened with the passage of affirmative action programs in the 1960s. Black enrollment in college nearly doubled from 1960 to 1980.An ideology developed around the idea that education is the solution to all social ills and that it can eradicate poverty by developing human beings into more valuable human capital.  

　　In response to the massive student uprising in the 1960s and 1970s, universities made concessions to the movement. While many of students’ most radical demands were denied — like open admission, democratization of the university, and the adoption of a radical curriculum related to issues of oppression — other major shifts did occur. For example, by 1972, Black studies programs existed in over 1,000 campuses, and according to a report called Higher Education and the Black American, Black studies filled “a standard, if insecure, niche in the curriculum.” Women’s studies departments sprang up all over the country as well, and universities were forced to diversify their courses and faculty. 

　　The Neoliberal University 

　　By the late 20th century, however, the higher-education landscape began to shift again, influenced by the rise of neoliberal ideology and the adoption of market principles into higher education. Neoliberalism emerged at the end of the 1970s as a response to a crisis in the postwar economic order. In the neoliberal epoch, capitalists managed to find limited but real mechanisms for accumulation by reopening markets to capital in China and in the former Soviet bloc. In addition to finding new sectors of the working class to exploit, the capitalists, particularly in imperialist countries, led a wave of attacks to discipline their own working classes and guarantee even more surplus value from workers in the context of a crisis of capitalist accumulation. This took the form of privatizations, attacks on workers’ rights, and austerity measures. Trickle-down economics and low tax rates for the wealthy meant a vast increase in income disparities and, increasingly, a debt-based economy. 

　　Universities were not exempt from these new pressures, setting them on a course of transformation from the institutions for the public good, as they were once widely seen, to the austerity-battered, admin-heavy, overpriced degree mills we know today. One of the hallmarks of these kinds of universities is the shift from public to private funding sources and higher tuition that put the financial burden of attending a university on the student.  

　　Thanks to austerity measures and the lack of public funding, universities themselves have also taken on debt. As Lend and Rule highlights, long-term debt held by public institutions increased by 482 percent from 1989 to 2021. Their institutional debt creates a profit for banks and financial capital, leveraged by the promise to increase student tuition whenever needed. In this sense, public universities are, increasingly, a myth: they are not publicly funded by taxes but by debt, taken on by both the institution and the students. 

　　While the neoliberal university included more people in higher education than ever before in U.S. history, that inclusion did not mean equalizing the social hierarchy; rather, neoliberalism made the rich richer and the poor poorer while promoting the ideology of schools as the great equalizer. The neoliberal university made the university not only an instrument of hegemony for the capitalist class, but also a source of profit, whether by debt, investments, privatization, or adjunctification. 

　　The Crisis of the Neoliberal University 

　　The 2008 economic crisis opened up broader questioning of capitalism and its institutions, including the universities. This marked a crisis of neoliberalism more broadly and has expressed itself politically through a crisis of traditional parties and the emergence of left- and right-wing populisms. The crisis of progressive neoliberalism has also meant a crisis for the university, its bastion, whose administrations had promoted a type of neoliberal consensus, or “extreme center,” as Tariq Ali calls it. Now we can see more divisions both at the top and at the bottom within universities as well. 

　　As part of the broader crisis of neoliberalism, we’ve seen less ideological consensus when it comes to the commonsense ideas of neoliberalism and more polarization.  

　　Against this backdrop of growing tensions from the student and labor movement on one side and an increasingly active Far Right, which has the backing of sectors of capital, it’s clear that the neoliberal university is facing a crisis of sustainability. This is most evident in the recent ousting of Columbia president Minouche Shafik, who brutally repressed Columbia students, but not soon enough or rigorously enough for the Zionists on her board, who ousted her over the summer. Shafik’s resignation is a key example that the center cannot hold. 

　　The convergence of rising costs, political attacks, working class and student activism, and the suppression of dissent points to the contradictions of the neoliberal university’s model, which is ultimately driven by the needs of capitalist greed and imperialist oppression. What is the alternative model of universities that can genuinely serve the interests of working class and oppressed people here and around the world? 

　　Universities for the Working Class and Oppressed 

　　As Bowles and Gintis have highlighted, schools are not only a space to create hegemony for the state, but also a space to create the rebels who will question it all. That is happening right before our eyes. The movement for Palestine opened a period of intensified crisis for the neoliberal university, which has meant the formation of a revitalized repressive apparatus at the university, and the erosion of some of the academic freedoms and democratic rights that were won out of the struggles of the 1960s and 1970s. The bipartisan regime, hand in hand with the university bureaucracy, is seeking to impose a new relation of force at the university. 

　　But, while we defend our democratic rights at the university, we also fight for a different kind of university — a university that does not serve capital but the working class and oppressed. One that does not function like a business, run by university presidents with exorbitant salaries, but that is run by and for students, faculty, staff, and the community. 

　　Rather than shape curriculum and research agendas around the needs of capitalist imperialism, we can leverage advances in technology, science, and culture at the service of the masses. This could even include leveraging the specialized knowledge of economic planning to be put into use for the planning of a socialist society. With a looming environmental crisis, wars around the world, and the potential for more health crises like the pandemic, we need a university that addresses the critical issues that affect the working class and oppressed people: science that addresses climate change, that researches trans medical issues, or that seeks to study and preserve indigenous languages. 

　　In that spirit, a university of and for the working class and community would include students and faculty of color beyond tokenism as a justification for racist and imperialist policies. Rather, the university would address the issues affecting oppressed people: research centers that create solutions for the problems created by structural racism, sexism, homophobia, and transphobia. Against the right-wing distortions of Marxism, we demand a university that includes and studies leftist thought and ideas, posing the foundations and roots of the complete rot that is capitalism and strategies for the way out. For us, this is the study of Marx, as well as the contributions of Rosa Luxemburg, Lenin, Trotsky, Gramsci, Mariátegui, C L R. James, and others. For us, Marxism presents not only a theory and explanation of class society but a practical guide for transforming society and liberating humanity. 

　　Ultimately, universities should be institutions where we can reflect on how, together, we can build a society free from exploitation and oppression. But they are also important sites of struggle. 

　　Amid a revitalized student movement and reactivated labor movement in the heart of imperialism and in other countries around the world, students and workers have the opportunity to not only “interpret the world,” as Marx famously said, but also to “change it.” 

　　Editor: Zhong Yao  LiuTingting 

　　From:https://www.leftvoice.org/the-crisis-of-the-neoliberal-university-and-the-need-for-a-working-class-alternative/（2024-10-29）