An interview with Darwin BondGraham by David Zlutnick
Darwin BondGrahm is a writer, historian, and ethnographer who lives and works variously in California, New Orleans, and New Mexico. He is a graduate student in the Sociology Department at UC Santa Barbara where his research engages histories of what Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. called the big three: poverty, racism, and militarism. His research aims to further organizing against war and the Military-Industrial-Academic Complex (MIAC), and against racist economic policies that harm the working class, particularly issues related to housing. When I caught up with Darwin to have the following conversation he was in Albuquerque, NM working with the Los Alamos Study Group (http://www.lasg.org/). He is now on his way back to New Orleans where he has been working with the Right to Return Movement. He and his colleague Will Parish are currently in the process of writing a book critically analyzing the University of California and its role in the MIAC. His writings can be found at http://darwinbondgraham.blogspot.com/.
David Zlutnick: Could you start by giving a brief overview of the development of the “university” in the United States starting at the beginning of the 20th Century?
Darwin BondGraham: Universities in the United States began as rather marginal institutions in terms of the power they exercised, in terms of their importance to other spheres of economic and social life. Most early universities that were established basically became socializing institutions for the children of the upper class – men especially.
Real fundamental research in the sciences and engineering wasn’t being carried out in these academic settings. Rather, it was taking place in industrial labs, or else in the labs of private investigators supported by philanthropists. Really though, important research in chemistry, physics, engineering, biology, all this was taking place in Europe. America was a backwater.
However, the late 1800s began to change all of this. The rise of the US as an economic powerhouse created a need for more knowledge production and more skilled knowledge-based workforce. The advent of the land grant universities after 1862, when Congress passed the Morrill Act, brought about a new era in other ways. Also called the “Land Grant Act” because it granted large amounts of lands to the states to establish colleges, this legislation enabled each state to create a university system. The colleges built on this land and with the proceeds of land sales were to teach a much wider citizenry than the universities established before them. The studies were to be much more practical and geared toward economic growth. Agriculture and the mechanical arts were emphasized. The land grant college system had an inbuilt tension between those populist interests that wanted schools to develop and teach practical agricultural and mechanical technologies, and larger capitalist interests that desired schools to train a smaller elite in the arts of business administration, law, and other professions.
From day one the federal government ensured that these institutions were militarized. Military tactics were to be taught to students. Even so, the universities remained marginal into the opening of the 20th Century.
DZ: World War II changed the nature of higher education in the United States through massive investment from the military and led to what is termed the “Military-Industrial-Academic Complex.” How did this process take place and who initiated it?
DB: The nature of capitalist industry and the fundamental role of technological development in warfare was by mid-Century transforming the role of universities, and vice versa. A group of leading scientists/university administrators (men like Vannevar Bush, James Conant, Karl Compton, Robert Millikan, Ernest Lawrence, etc.) worked alongside leaders in the federal government and industry to carve out a new role for the university. The period leading into and especially out of World War II saw the nation’s largest universities (a group of roughly 100 or so, but especially the big 10 or 20 schools) assume much of the load of fundamental science and engineering research that was the basis for everything from radar to atomic weapons. It was an efficient shuffling of responsibilities. The federal government controlled the purse strings for weapons contracts. Private industry would manufacture the weapons and war material. Universities would acquire the contracts to research, design and even test components for weapons. Some university contracts would even involve the full scale production of weapons. Leaders in industry and academia basically agreed that it was good for both parties to see universities take over the research role. Industry dropped much of its basic research capacity after this, retaining a much more applied and product development oriented program.
Today, private industry’s contract expenditures for research still dwarfs the university system, but universities do a huge share of research, particularly weapons research, all of it aimed at investigating and developing fundamental breakthroughs that will enable new technologies. An important point to make here is that the rise of the Military-Industrial-Academic Complex (MIAC) wasn’t some organic development that just happened. It was organized by an elite group of men who ran the nation’s prestigious universities, the men who controlled the industrial corporations with military contracts, and the military itself. Resulting from this has been the so-called “revolving door,” the status quo now in which it’s not uncommon to see university executives holding corporate positions and ex-military brass becoming advisers or board members at big weapons manufacturing companies. There is overlap among those (mostly) men who run the universities, major corporations and banks, and the state/military. It’s a complex synergy at work between these three major spheres of power—the military, corporate capital, and the university system.
Bringing the universities into this complex ensured many things for all interested parties. For the military it ensured the continual development of new technologies for war-making by many competing organizations. For the corporations it meant being able to abandon unprofitable and increasingly expensive programs of basic research, the payoffs for which were not guaranteed. For universities it ensured a steady stream of funds for the new brands of big science in physics, engineering and other disciplines.
DZ: My understanding is that it was originally the military that began investing in universities and that corporations followed. Is this correct? What is the history of corporate influence in higher education and how did this blend with that of the military?
DB: Corporations (or the agents thereof) were always interested in universities, especially after passage of the Land Grant Acts. It wasn’t until the federal government began its program of massive university subsidization through weapons research contracts that private industry really figured out how to game the new system. Corporations have basically assumed a position to benefit from what sociologist Fred Block calls the “hidden developmentalist state.” The state funds research that creates new technologies, ones that hold serious potential for transforming the economy. Corporations have gotten close to the university and meshed with the university partially in order to cherry pick these developments and make enormous profits from them. Remember that these technological breakthroughs are the products of a more or less socialist system – federal tax dollars funding work by mostly public employees of big universities or university-linked labs. Corporations get close to this work by funding their own research on campuses, by setting up research shops nearby to create networks with university researchers, by funding massive centers on campuses. Or they recruit directly from labs on campus. Nothing is secret about any of this. Anyone in the hard sciences or engineering knows how this system works. This is American capitalism hard at work. The only thing secret here is the fundamentally social origin of the wealth and work that all ends up getting privatized so that a few corporations can make huge profits.
I guess that doesn’t really answer the above question, but what I’m trying to get at is that it’s neither/nor. Both corporations and the military have been making inroads for awhile now, and their inroads have had mutually beneficial effects for one another. This has all empowered certain kinds of science/academic administrators who run things in a more corporate fashion. And this process peaks during moments of enclosure when the federal patron or corporation snatches up the new technology developed and claims it for its sole use.
Last thing that should be added, however, is that much of the technology getting produced under this regime is rather worthless to the vast majority of people, both locally and globally. University produced technology itself it mostly worthless for solving the fundamental problems facing humanity. I would go so far as to say that most of what comes out of big science at the major universities is in fact a dangerous sort of technology that is being generated to assist in corporate enclosures of land and life (see Vandana Shiva’s recent work on this subject), or else it’s technology that because of the larger social order will never benefit the majority of humanity. It will make the lives of the top 20% better, but it won’t reach those at the bottom. The real solutions are to be found in social justice – the attainment of new social relations, new economic forms, etc.
DZ: What are the long-term effects from the establishment of the Military-Industrial-Academic Complex on the university?
DB: In the long-term it means that universities are increasing what Clark Kerr identified as the “multiversity.” Kerr’s multiversity concept was meant to identify the new (1960s-new) nature of the university. Instead of being an “ivory tower” detached from the buzz of the everyday world, the univesrity would be an active and porous institution responding to the needs of many constituents. Kerr went so far as to say that the university was “responsible” to the complex and sometimes competing interests of society.
However, Kerr’s multiversity was very limited in scope. The many constituents it served (and Kerr’s campus at Berkeley is a great example) was in fact a short list: mostly state agencies and large corporations. The multiversity is multiply responsible to the state, its military apparatus, and corporate capital. Kerr and other thinkers at the time and through to the present mostly excluded wider publics. The university was not seen as having a responsibility to say local communities around a campus, to social movements, to labor unions (excepting the biggest and most conservative), etc.
The long-term effects of the Military-Industrial-Academic Complex are going to be a further entrenchment of the university as multiversity. As the institutional and interpersonal links have strengthened between the military-industry-university spheres of control the ways that each serves the other becomes further reinforced. Furthermore, the wider communities that are not just sometimes in competition with say corporations or state bureaucrats, but are in fact opposed as a matter of class, race, nationality, gender, and political ideology find themselves excluded from the university. Exclusion occurs through both hegemonic domination of the university’s system of governance and academic production, but also through forms of economic coercion or state violence. You find workers and labor unions struggling to exist and transform the university as workers, always trying to find ways of gaining a foothold in the knowledge production areas of schools to create ideas and policy to their benefit (remember California Gov. Schwarzenegger’s repeated attempts to kill the University of California’s Labor Insitute?). In this time of the strong multiversity you see underrepresented racial groups increasingly excluded, especially working-class people of color. You see shrinking levels of support and a renewed right-wing assault on the centers of knowledge production established to support social movements – ethnic studies departments, gender/feminist studies, and so on. You see militarized knowledge production predominant over other ways of thinking, over other goal oriented programs of basic research.
There are other more democratic models, but these will be nothing more than novel spaces within the university system, certainly nothing approaching the scope of the military and corporate capital’s domination of science and education.
DZ: Looking at the history of activism within the university system, most believe it started in the 60s with civil rights, the fight for ethnic studies, the anti-war movement, etc, all of which followed the beginning of heavy investment by the military and corporations. But was there any resistance to the initial influx of this funding into the education system, which began in the 40s, by either students, faculty, or outside the school setting?
DB: Not really. I mean you could point to examples here and there of students rebelling against this or that policy. You could talk especially about the ongoing black freedom movement’s development of colleges as vehicles to liberation and their ongoing efforts to desegregate schools in the 1950s. Or maybe you could note the rare critiques of people like Thorsten Veblen or Upton Sinclair who were plain spoken about corporate and state influence over universities. Sinclair wrote about the subject in 1923 saying, “our educational system is not a public service, but an instrument of special privilege; its purpose is not to further the welfare of mankind, but merely to keep America capitalist.” But none of this really constituted movement against the multiversity as what it was.
The rise of the student rebellions in the 1960s and 70s coincided with the rise of the multiversity as a key sphere of power in our society, and for good reason. Students, faculty and others had visions of a different university, one that was radically different from what was emerging from the post-War glow of atomic America. They were rebellion during the key era of the university’s final and full integration with the state and corporations.
DZ: You use the term “polyversity” to describe “an institution that would include many peoples and many visions, seeking not just profit or progress, however defined, but also peace, justice, and an ethically grounded system of democratic education.” You argue that the move towards this type of institution following the movements of the 50s and 60s was a step forward in the transformation of the university from the “multiversity,” which you spoke of earlier. What concrete gains were made during this time that defined the advancement towards this goal of a polyversity? How were these gains won?
DB: Concrete gains were huge and we should honor them, and learn from them. First and foremost I would say that the successful challenge to overt white supremacy and male dominance of the university deserves our attention. Of course university education and the kinds of research that get done remain anything but racially just or feminist, but there was a radical opening up of the university system so that the majority of students are now women, and the numbers of black, Latino and other students of color is significant. People fought for this and endured attacks on their life and liberty to achieve what we have. Young black men and women risked death to open up their state universities across America. Black and Chicano students spearheaded the creation of Ethnic Studies departments across the nation, and they did it through direct action combined with serious political organizing. Women created centers on many campuses and established academic programs while simultaneously taking on the systemic sexism that kept women out of many academic programs and excluded them from leadership positions. The kinds of knowledge being produced through these accomplishments are immeasurable and have had a very important influence on guiding social movements far beyond the university. Clearly it was the attainment of a small degree of justice. We could name many other programs, “spaces” if you will, in which alternative forms of knowledge not geared toward administration of the state, prosecution of war, or accumulation of profit have been able to grow inside the university. Think Peace and Conflict Studies or the countless environmental programs and research labs that have been able to flourish.
Again, what won these gains was courage and direct action on the part of students, faculty, staff and their few allies in positions of power. It took all kinds of tactics and a variety of contributions. Many people played a role. And all of this should be seen in the context of a wider counter-culture that was seeking to blaze new paths in all directions life, not just in the university. People wanted new forms of housing, community life, food and land ownership, government and sexuality. It was a creative time when a significant proportion of the US people were willing to take some serious chances in the face of a rigid and repressive system.
DZ: What caused the erosion of the movement towards a polyversity?
DB: Same things that caused the decline of a viable new democratic culture with new values in the United States. However, if I could systematically list these things then we’d have a solution to the problem, or at least a problem to name, and we could effectively resist this erosion. Wouldn’t that be nice?
My thinking on this has a lot to do with racism. If you look at the movement leaders who really set the pace for the democratic transformation of the university and truly radicalized the most people, it was the black students down south, and “up south” as they called places like Michigan and California, who took some enormous risks to not only desegregate higher education, but to question the whole university system’s goals. They were successful for a time and they managed to inspire countless young white radicals. The Chican@ activists along with American Indian Movement activists and Asian American radicals played a big part here too. What these racial liberation movements were up to was more than a shallow desegregation of capitalist America. At their most honest and most powerful they sought a re-writing of the American story, not just to include them, but to include them in a drama that wasn’t any longer about exploiting and killing others in South East Asia or South Central Los Angeles. The new vision was about real democracy and justice.
However, the majority of whites in America who held the majority of the wealth and power—we’re talking about the enfranchised citizenry of the consumer empire that is the United States—they opposed this change. At first they resisted with overt violence and repression as was visible in Birmingham against the Civil Rights Movement, for example, or else at Kent State against the students. But this was going to be a losing tactic, especially when it was white middle-class kids dying. The winning counter-movement really gained power in the 1980s. Reagan’s election was a signal that the tide had shifted. White supremacy and what scholar George Lipsitz calls “competitive consumer citizenship” carried the day. Whites and the new black and brown upper classes who allied themselves with the ruling class withdrew themselves both physically and economically from the public sphere that now had to include the black and brown masses because of the freedom movement’s victories. The public commons that now had to truly represent the diverse interests of society was abandoned in favor of pseudo-public suburbs or else privatized commons now firmly controlled by white capital and powerful corporations. This revanchist movement means a lot in terms of the prospects for having a polyversity. It means that the public school system that should be preparing all students, regardless of race, for university admittance is woefully inept and under-funded. It means a bifurcated set of spending priorities for the state whereby it funds an educational system designed for the success of some students and a prison system designed to possess other mostly black and brown youths. It means a university system geared to produce skilled workers for corporate middle management, not a citizenry ready to challenge the very notion and terms of citizenship and democracy.
When the radical spirit of these antiracist movements was crushed we saw the inspiration for so much more disappear. By destroying the freedom movement’s momentum, opponents of the new society it was fighting for blocked so much more, including the prospects for a polyversity. In one fell swoop they did a lot to undermine the potential for an anti-militarist movement and a real ecologically grounded movement. Thus today we have anti-war movements that oppose this or that war, not the system that produces war, and we have this pathetic environmental movement that touts things like making corporations and universities “sustainable,” and “green,” not by challenging the fundamentals of the ecological crisis.
DZ: How have the military and corporations retained their influence over universities in the United States? What has this continued investment meant in real terms for students and faculty?
DB: The military has had to scale back on applied research in universities, big time. Several reasons caused this. Student rebellions against several very high profile military funded labs such as Draper Labs at MIT, Stanford Research Institute, Cornell Aerophysics Lab, caused crisis situations where the university Regents (or their equivalent – MIT has a “Board of Directors,” Stanford has “Trustees”) decided that it was no longer worthwhile to have direct links with these massive on-campus weapons chop shops funded by the Pentagon.
Faculty aversion to military funding was a big deal also. One of the major shifts away from military grants occurred during the 1980s when many researchers finally found the goals of the Reagan administration to weaponize space and nuclearize warfare to new levels, among other things, far too dangerous and unethical, therefore they averred from doing research that DARPA, Missile Defense Agency, Air Force and other “Star Wars”-players wanted done. Lots of scientists refused military sponsorship earlier during Vietnam also.
To deal with this and other challenges the military-industrial-university administrators did things like privatize labs such as Draper, SRI, and Cornell. They moved them physically away from campuses, and they began to strategically diversify some of the more weaponized labs with small amounts of biomedical or supposedly civilian science so as to blunt criticisms. For those professors seeking alternative sources of funds to do research in certain fields, the reality soon hit that the single largest source of funds for their disciplines is DoD or corporate money. They could run, but not hide from the reality, and as specific wars or military programs came and went, so too did waves of opposition based on morality and political ideals.
There have been so many other ways that the military-industrial establishment has further inculcated itself into the university that it’s really hard to describe. There are extensive networks of recruitment for university-educated researchers and technicians into weapons labs, industrial companies, and the armed services research labs.
Ultimately, it hasn’t been that difficult for the military and corporations to retain their dominance over American science. Keep in mind two things: the whole system has evolved as a logical whole, and there is a lot of ideological buy-in from many, if not most scientists themselves.
On that first point, we need to recognize that demilitarizing the university isn’t a question of simply extracting the military component of funding from science. It would mean a drastic transformation of the whole university, in everything from its scale to its organizational form, the size and position of various departments within schools, the role and relationship of education to research, graduate education, administrative authority versus faculty and student power—everything would necessarily have to change.
On the second point, we should recognize that most university educated researchers believe in American mythology about the greatness and justice of the US state, that it is a democratic force for peace in the world, and that the American military needs the products of their genius to “keep peace” and ward off “chaotic anarchy.” Let’s be real: most university-educated people—especially at the top tiers where much of the weapons research and development gets done—are incredibly privileged citizens of this imperial state. They don’t see militarization of science as a problem. There’s not a lot of criticism coming from scientists these days about the dominance of military thinking and goals over American science. There have been past waves where the opposite was true, but we live in very uncritical times. Let me be blunt: most people who live inside the empire’s green zones like their privilege and power, and they’re not willing to give it up.
DZ: Unfortunately a common characteristic among universities across the country is the unjust treatment of university employees, especially low-wage service workers. This includes, but is definitely not limited to, compensation far below a living-wage, no or inaccurate adjustments for cost of living, lack of comprehensive health care coverage, no participation in the decision-making process, and anti-union practices. What sort of connection do you see between this sort of treatment of university workers and these institutions’ continued military and corporate backing?
DB: I see systematic connections.
Let’s start with some history. Working class people made some important gains in this country following World War II. The union movement had succeeded in raising wages in many industries (although non-whites and women were largely excluded). Service workers were still lagging, but the cost of living hadn’t been so extreme as we now see with inflationary pressures. There was a civil rights movement that was opening up new freedoms and achieving some degree of economic justice.
Part of the backlash against this involved a shift of population, political power, and capital to what we call the “Sunbelt,” or more accurately the “Gunbelt.” The Gunbelt is that Atlantic Coast, new South, Southwest, and West Coast slice of America that arose in power after World War II. Key to this was the investment of military spending in weapons contracts and military bases in these hyper-militarized regions. Local elites in places like California (Cali is actually the best case-study) successfully shifted the federal priorities in very imperialistic directions. They demanded nuclearization of the country and a very hawkish foreign policy. They actively supported US military intervention abroad to facilitate US corporate power. They built up martial metropolises like San Diego, Santa Clara, Santa Barbara, Los Angeles, all of which relied on war spending to build up their local economies.
Congruent with this was that these areas in the new South (think Houston, Atlanta, Memphis), Southwest (Pheonix, Albuquerque, El Paso), and West Coast, were viciously anti-union, anti-working class. The elites in these locales had managed to construct highly exploitative local labor regimes on which to build their base of power. Much of this was done by subjugating the Black migrant population, Latinos, and in the Southwest the indigenous tribes through forms of racial domination, ghettoization and incarceration. Much of this was non-racial in that workers were targeted regardless of race. Union activity was crushed throughout the South and West. Only certain sectors of workers in specific industries were allowed to organize. This was a profound strategy on the part of corporations because they created a geographic redoubt from which they would eventually emerge again at the national level to undermine unions and working-class power.
The link here is direct – the leading corporations and therefore some of the political and economic elites from these regions who created this situation were coming directly from the militarized sector of the economy. American military spending helped more than anything to produce a corporate fortress—the “right to work states,” and rabidly anti-union Southern California—and this in turn has served as a powerful base from which to roll back working class gains and democracy nation wide. So we have seen the demise of unions and non-union forms of worker self-organization over the past several decades.
Another connection that’s even clearer to see in the present is that university Regents overwhelmingly hail from business backgrounds. It’s always been this way for the land grant schools, although one could argue that the proportion of businessmen running universities has increased significantly over the past 70 years or so. When you have business people running schools, they tend to use the tools they use in corporate management to run the school. They think like corporate executives about issues such as budgeting and personnel. So how does a school save money? Fire workers, pay them less, don’t keep wages up with inflation, increase their co-pays for medical care, raid their pensions, reduce their work hours, etc.
Finally, there is a structural issue at work here. State budgets nationally have been in terrible shape since about the early 1970s now. What James O’Connor calls the “fiscal crisis of the state” is the norm now. There’s no longer such a thing as normal operation for state budgeting processes. Crisis is the norm as politicians battle one another into special sessions to forge budgets. The crisis has many causes, too many to get into here, but the main agents starving the state for funds are monopoly capital and the enfranchised consumer class. Corporations support little to no regulation, low tax rates with regressive forms and big spending on corporate subsidies. The enfranchised consumer classes (the heirs to the white backlash against the Civil Rights Movement) seek to prevent the state from taxing their wealth, fearing that it will be redistributed on democratic social programs, and therefore they would have to share this with working class people, blacks, etc.
So while the Regents of universities decry the state budget and blame lack of funds on the “hard decisions” they have to make in their role as the beneficent overseers of our higher education system, on the other hand they sit in these corporate board meetings the next day slapping themselves on the back for making record profits and having to share little of it with the state through taxation. Meanwhile they’re also benefitting from the highly privatized form of government we now have that keeps racially subordinated groups from sharing in social goods.
DZ: How are the current labor struggles that exist in universities connected to the movements of students and faculty striving for their schools to better meet their needs, become more diverse, become more affordable, divest from the military, etc?
DB: To me it’s all the same, and obviously so. I don’t see how someone could separate the issues at stake here. Clearly the administrators and Regents (and the wider corporate community they aim to please) have a set of unifying objectives: privatize and enclose the commons, reduce wages as much as possible, put more of the financing load on students through fees, retool research programs to create profitable technologies and be more responsive to the needs of corporations and the state. For movements to confront only one of these issues is a losing strategy.
DZ: Following the huge social upheavals of the 60s/70s there is a perceived slump in social justice organizing and activism, particularly in the university setting. Is this accurate? Briefly, what types of organizing were going on during this alleged “gap in activism” between the end of the Vietnam War in 1975 and the invasion of Iraq in 2003?
DB: I’d actually agree that there was a slump, but not because all the radicals who were willing to fight for something gave up and went home, or sold out. I think the real story here is about the counter-movement led by a combination of corporate elites, and a more populist-racist attack against the gains of the Civil Rights Movement, along with anti-feminist sentiments amongst most men, and a greedy consumer citizenship that pervades our culture.
Truly democratic social movements have had trouble gaining ground in this post-Civil Rights era. The Right has successfully beaten us back. We’re still searching for ways to recover.
So yes, people stopped protesting and organizing. This is partly because it was no longer working. Repression and co-optation were effective in many places. Sadly it’s still where we’re at today.
DZ: It seems a fair amount of those movements since the 70s were what we could call “solidarity movements”—such as the anti-apartheid struggle, organizing in support of liberation movements in Latin America and elsewhere, movements opposed to US intervention or the anti-Gulf War movement, just to name a few—where those organizing were not necessarily those primarily effected by the issue at hand. Do you believe this could have had an effect on the level of mass participation in these campaigns in contrast to, say, the Free Speech Movement or the fight for Ethnic Studies where people could relate on a more personal level to the goals of the campaigns?
DB: I’m not sure it’s like this, at least not in whole. For example, the Free Speech Movement was certainly something that was going to directly affect (liberate if you will) the students of Berkeley and beyond. But it was spurred by participation in the Civil Rights Movement. Those Berkeley radicals who organized the FSM did so to organize against a racist system that wasn’t harming them, and then to later oppose a war that not until years later would threaten them through the draft. I think there are other examples above that can be blurred in this way.
However, I do agree in part with what you’re saying. Much of what passes as student activism is a form of solidarity activism. Students gain a knowledge of how fucked up the world is, how worse off others are, and they want to help out those less fortunate than themselves. It’s a healthy emotional response, but it’s fraught with problems of identity and representational power as we all know. When students screw this up through their organizing they stop being effective in solidarity, and they can actually do harm to those they claim to be helping.
The real issue here, I think, is not that issues of war, nuclear weapons, genocide in distant lands, US imperialism in Latin America, etc., don’t directly affect students at big US universities. These things do directly affect all students. The problem is that it affects most US students in that it benefits them, materially and ideologically. Let’s face reality: most Americans, for the most part, benefit from the global system’s horrible inequities. Because we do, most of us feel and desire no pressing need to change things. In fact, doing something that is genuinely anti-racist, anti-imperialist, would mean giving up power, privilege, wealth, and so much more. This isn’t the kind of activism students are primed into pursuing. Instead, most students, because they are middle-class children of the world’s enfranchised consumer class, see activism through a perverse mentality that could be called a kind of modern and global noblesse oblige.
Campaigns like Stop Genocide in Darfur or a great deal of the trips students have taken to the Gulf Coast after Hurricane Katrina fit this problematic model. The goals are about saving the poor brown masses from themselves, or from distant forces of nature, forces of evil. Activism is conceived of as an intervention by us good-hearted people into those parts of the world that are not yet “modernized” or “democratized.” Activism becomes easy and self-fulfilling because it doesn’t implicate any of us, Americans, or US authorities in the evil doing. Instead, activism is all about “educating” people so that they can make the right choices. It’s a slightly consumerist model with very elitist strains. It’s terribly privileged in the worst way because there’s no analysis of privilege as a potentially harmful position of power over others.
I think the interventions that students made in the 70s, 80s, and 1990s against things like US intervention in Latin America, for example, is different from this. Lots of the students who got involved in this developed a critique of their own society, its historical relationship to states south of the border, and moved not only to help the people of El Salvador and Chile (among others on a long list), but to challenge centers of power in the US, and to change themselves and this society. This is a key difference. The anti-apartheid movement is similar. Students said, “Look, the university, our university, is profiting off of this horrible racist regime over there. US politicians (like Dick Cheney) are supporting the apartheid government. The US is deeply involved there. We are implicated personally and socially and we have various ways of changing this situation based on the institutions that we can challenge here and now. We are directly affected and we don’t want this blood on our hands.” Thus they organized a divestment movement that was really meaningful. It differed from the Darfur divestment because it meant challenging our own positions of power and privilege as we were directly connected to the oppressed.
As an aside, isn’t it interesting how easily and agreeably the UC (University of California) Regents divested from those companies doing business with Sudan, but how bitterly they resisted divestment from South Africa? Think about that, and think about what it means in terms of these two campaigns and the different kinds of movements they represent. One was truly part of the global anti-racist movement. The other is much more problematic and interestingly plays into the interests of some powerful US imperialist interests who would like nothing more than to see the regime in Sudan and its Chinese patrons run into more problems in their exploitation of the lands and peoples of Darfur.
I suppose I have to end by saying that what’s going on in Darfur is horrible. I’m glad the UC no longer owns stock in companies doing business with the reprehensible al-Bashir administration and their Chinese business partners. But I can name several other genocides and humanitarian crimes that the UC is more directly connected to, ones that we could do much more to stop from happening. Where’s the action on that?
DZ: What sort of potential do you see in the existing student movements?
DB: I don’t know. A lot and a little.
But potentials can only grow through a combination of political movement and cultural shift. We need to focus on the long-haul in both our strategically instrumental thinking as well as in the way we live our daily lives and relate to one another. Only then will real potentials begin to emerge.
Some things I think would be really wonderful include: a student union instead of student government; a union to empower those students employed by the UC; more solidarity with campus workers; a much more radical and confrontational environmental movement that moves away from greening/sustainability and toward fundamental transformation.
DZ: You’re currently a student at the University of California, Santa Barbara. What vision do you have for the UC, and maybe UCSB in particular, in regards to what it could look like after an ideal transformation?
DB: Honestly I’d be for a disbanding of the UC-system and all these other elephants of higher ed. Perhaps the main reason we have a UC system is because of the power-hungry goals of this state’s economic elites. The systematizing of the campuses and centralization of the budget process and channels of authority doesn’t benefit the people of this state. The system as a way to organize the university has just a few plus sides, all of which could be done with a much looser, more federated structure. Yes, it’s nice to apply once instead of at each campus. It’s also nice to pool things like retirement funds or general endowment. The library as one big sharing system is pretty sweet. But if you think about the role of the UC Regents and UCOP (UC Office of the President), it’s really nefarious. Giving each university much more autonomy and getting rid of the Regents would probably be a major improvement. I guess this would mean dismantling the UC as we know it.
So much more has to change though. Any vision for what the university could be has to be informed by a much wider vision about society as a whole. Do we keep a $600+ billion a year military? Should our nation remain an empire? Should our technological innovation remain a servant to corporate profits? What sorts of knowledge are we missing right now? Is university education really a means to self-improvement and social harmony, or it instead a raw mechanism for social stratification, creator of the haves and have-nots? Should we even organize education and research through big universities and colleges? So much has to be fundamentally questioned.
The biggest universities as of now are very imperialistic institutions obsessed with growth and hungry for the power that close links to corporations and the state give them. Until our culture becomes more widely de-militarized and less dominated by monopoly capitalism our universities will remain very limited multiversities with small prefigurations of what could be surviving here and there in the cracks.
So in the end I suppose I’m actually against most of the university as it exists, which is ironic given that I’ve spent 8 years of my life in it as a student, have taught in universities, and been an employee of them. Life is contradictory, is it not? But this should be evident to everyone who wants to see change: we are both in the problem and against it – and against it and beyond it.
David Zlutnick began most of his political organizing in student movements at UC Santa Cruz focusing on anti-war/demilitarization and labor solidarity. After graduating in 2006 he now lives in San Francisco where he works on various projects, including being a member and contributor to the Friendly Fire Collective
