I write our first extended feature exploring the pressing domestic issue of ballooning student debt and tuition costs, framing it within the context of the increasingly corporatized American nonprofit university. The piece also highlights a few current nodes of resistance.

Jonathan Lyle focuses this broader analysis on North Carolina’s public university students, currently mounting a vibrant campaign against the rising tide of austerity budgeting. An organizer himself with the North Carolina Student Power Union (NCSPU), Jonathan offers an insider’s viewpoint on the pitched academic struggles in his home state.

Our third piece, another extended feature by Bobo Bose-Kolanu, delves deep into the history and culture of students’ institutional opposition. Documenting the coercion and surveillance of student activists by the CIA, FBI, and other state actors with exceptional detail, Bobo paints a startling portrait of the U.S.’s covert repression of dissent. He reminds us yet again that the stakes of student activism are far from trivial.

I learned a lot in the course of compiling this issue, and we hope that you as a reader will too.

Warmly,

Prashanth

Fast-forward just a few years, and thanks largely to the vocal efforts of organizers with Occupy and global student resistance spanning across continents, the struggles of today’s debt-ridden college generation have become a pressing political flashpoint demanding urgent resolution.

Massive walkouts late last year at colleges in the New York and University of California systems helped ignite the student debt issue with real potency. Students, the mainstream media finally noticed, are outraged enough to take drastic steps in resisting the collective burden of rippling debt and defaults. Taking cues from student protestors worldwide, American college students have become increasingly adversarial against the unreasonable financial demands placed upon them by university administrators and debt collectors. California students recently attained at least a temporary success, turning out young voters in record numbers to raise taxes on the state’s wealthiest and freeze tuition hikes at public universities.

Around the same time as last year’s walkouts, Occupy Wall Street’s Education and Empowerment working group staged a large event at Liberty Plaza organized around a “debt refusal pledge” that ushered in the vibrant Occupy Student Debt Campaign (OSDC). In his speech via People’s Mic, Andrew Ross, a Strike Debt organizer and professor at New York University, emphasized the core principle animating students’ resistance worldwide, one deeply antithetical to today’s extreme neoliberal ideology driving the privatization of basic social goods like education, healthcare, and housing.

“Since the first days of the Occupy Wall Street movement, the agony of student debt has been a constant refrain,” Ross said. “We’ve heard truly harrowing personal testimony about the suffering and humiliation of people who believe that their debt will be unpayable in their lifetime… Education is not like buying a car or a flatscreen TV. Education is a right and a public good.”

The debt refusal pledge, still open for signatures on the OSDC website, reads as a succinct, aspirational statement of student protestors’ core beliefs:

As members of the most indebted generations in history, we pledge to stop making student loan payments after one million of us have signed this pledge.

Student loan debt, soon to top $1 trillion, is poisoning the pursuit of higher education. With chronic underemployment likely for decades to come, we will carry an intolerable burden into the future. The time has come to refuse this debt load. Debt distorts our educational priorities and severely limits our life options.

Education is not a commodity and it should not be a vehicle for generating debt, or profit for banks. Education at all levels –pre- K through Ph.D. — is a right and a public good.

• We believe the federal government should cover the cost of tuition at public colleges and universities.
• We believe that any student loan should be interest-free.
• We believe that private and for-profit colleges and universities, which are largely financed through student debt, should open their books.
• We believe that the current student debt load should be written off.

In acknowledgment of these beliefs, I am signing the Debtors’ Pledge of Refusal.

That these fundamental beliefs are controversial in today’s political atmosphere is a stunning symptom of the extent to which the religion of market economics has consumed our daily lives. The widespread indebtedness and underemployment of college graduates in the U.S., if anything, should be viewed as a staggering failure of the market to provide a secure, viable future for the country’s youth.

A report released by the New York Federal Reserve Bank early this year underlines the extent of the crisis. Cumulative student debt in this country, the report found, stands at $870 billion, easily surpassing the figures for credit card and automobile loans, with 27% of borrowers in repayment past due and 21% with delinquent loans. Some 37 million Americans currently hold an average of $23,500 student debt, defaults on which have risen for the fifth straight year such that 218 American colleges now have default rates over 30%. For poor and young households, student loan payments are harsher still, devouring roughly a quarter of all income. Yet while financial ruin looms for the significant number of students overwhelmed by their debt burdens, hedge fund investors who profit by betting against student loans are eager to collect the windfall, predicting default rates as high as 40% for current graduates. This is already the reality at the growing number of two-year for-profit universities, where 96% of students take on debt and 40% are in default within fifteen years.

Recent graduates are at the same time facing the worst job market since statistics were first logged in 1948. As of last summer, less than half of those actively seeking employment in the labor market aged 16-24 had paying jobs, and nearly half of those gainfully employed worked in the hospitality and retail industries, notorious for their low-paying and insecure job positions. Youth of this so-called “lost generation,” journalist Gary Lapon observes, can expect “a future of working low-paying jobs they are overqualified for in order to pay back loans for degrees that mean little at a time when the fastest-growing industries don’t require workers with a college education.”

Underpinning the explosion in student debt has been steep tuition increases across U.S. universities. Since 1978, average tuition rates have increased over 900%, 650 percentage points above inflation — as compared to the massive bubble in housing prices that increased only fifty points above the Consumer Price Index during that same period.

Analysts have moreover pointed out that the unfettered growth in college tuition has gone plenty of places, none of them concerned with improving instructional quality. Mark Bosquet, author of How the University Works (2008) points out:

If you’re enrolled in four college classes right now, you have a pretty good chance that one of the four will be taught by someone who has earned a doctorate and whose teaching, scholarship, and service to the profession has undergone the intensive peer scrutiny associated with the tenure system. In your other three classes, however, you are likely to be taught by someone who has started a degree but not finished it; was hired by a manager, not professional peers; may never publish in the field she is teaching; got into the pool of persons being considered for the job because she was willing to work for wages around the official poverty line (often under the delusion that she could ‘work her way into’ a tenurable position); and does not plan to be working at your institution three years from now.

As Bosquet explains at length, cuts to tenure-track positions have made academic labor increasingly precarious. Graduate students super-burdened with debt can easily be forced into sub-minimum wage labor, while the newfound wealth of cheap student labor pushes recent PhDs into insecure adjunct positions with depressed wages. Increased debt and tuition thus function counterintuitively to de-professionalize and degrade the quality of academic instruction.

Coupling this trend is a rise in the pay-scale of university administrators and the burgeoning college managerial class — a wholesale “corporatization” of the university. At current rates, the Department of Education estimates that by 2014 college administrators will outnumber instructors at four-year nonprofit U.S. universities.

Malcolm Harris has sketched the broader ramifications of this trend:

Formerly, administrators were more or less teachers with added responsibilities; nowadays, they function more like standard corporate managers—and they’re paid like them too. Once a few entrepreneurial schools made this switch, market pressures compelled the rest to follow the high-revenue model, which leads directly to high salaries for in-demand administrators. Even at nonprofit schools, top-level administrators and financial managers pull down six- and seven-figure salaries, more on par with their industry counterparts than with their fellow faculty members. […] When you hire corporate managers, you get managed like a corporation, and the race for tuition dollars and grants from government and private partnerships has become the driving objective of the contemporary university administration. The goal for large state universities and elite private colleges alike has ceased to be (if it ever was) building well-educated citizens; now they hardly even bother to prepare students to assume their places among the ruling class. Instead we have… “Digitize the curriculum! Build the best pool/golf course/stadium in the state! Bring more souls to God! Win the all-conference championship!” These expensive projects are all part of another cycle: corporate universities must be competitive in recruiting students who may become rich alumni, so they have to spend on attractive extras, which means they need more revenue, so they need more students paying higher tuition… And if a humanities program can’t demonstrate its economic utility to its institution (which can’t afford to haul “dead weight”) and students (who understand the need for marketable degrees), then it faces cuts, the neoliberal management technique par excellence. Students apparently have received the message loud and clear, as business has quickly become the nation’s most popular major… As the near-ubiquitous unpaid internship for credit (in which students pay tuition in order to work for free) replaces class time, the bourgeois trade school supplants the academy.

This dystopian future of a totally privatized university with indentured servitude as the price of entry is not one we as students in the academy have willfully chosen. Countervailing efforts, while still young, are building with immense promise.

As just a single, domestic snapshot, activists with Strike Debt have provided a framework for systemic analysis and long-term direct action against unjust debt, which they hope will underpin the movement for decades. Organizers have researched and compiled “The Debt Resistors’ Operations Manual,” combining educational material with guides for replicable direct actions. Studying the Savings & Loans crisis of the 1980s, organizers learned that debt can be bought on secondary markets for pennies on the dollar and eventually abolished, leading to the nascent “Rolling Jubilee” campaign where debt in default will be bought and abolished through mutual aid. As many activists have noted, the Rolling Jubilee promises to “spark” the largely silent issue of debt resistance but does not yet offer a full solution.

What this all points to is a need for the radical reorientation of political priorities. Campaigns by student organizers across the country and the world have pushed their beholden political representatives and public education officials to resist the myopic tide of austerity. Gone, they insist, is the time for technocratic policy fixes. The well-publicized executive order President Obama issued last year on the heels of deep cuts to Pell Grants and government subsidies for graduate tuition has been widely observed to provide only marginal relief for less than one-fifth of the country’s debt-burdened students.

As Ross and others have remarked, the political establishment must come to the understanding that education is a public, not private good, with benefits that accrue to the community at large. Depriving people of their right to an education through unaffordable tuition hikes and dissuading them from further studies by virtue of enormous debt burdens is a road to total social collapse. And we must avoid this future at all costs.

Student debt is just one of many kinds of odious, unjust debt — like that incurred for healthcare, housing, and other basic needs — that lay neoliberal mythology bare. As Richard Dienst notes, “The rulers can no longer pretend that debt is something we freely choose as a matter of rational self-interest. Instead, people are forced to take on debts in order to have any chance of having what counts as a good life in this society.”

For many Americans, this sort of indentured servitude is not an acceptable bargain. And the numbers in vocal resistance are quickly growing.

Prashanth Kamalakanthan is a junior at Duke University, where he is studying political science, environmental policy, and film. Prashanth is chair and co-founder of Duke Students for a Democratic Society (SDS), a student activism group, and an avid documentary film enthusiast.

Home to many of the nation’s best-ranked schools, North Carolina has long had a strong tradition in higher education. The recent passage of an 8.8% tuition hike, however, brought cuts that have devastated many critical aspects of college education, leaving many students and faculty in the University of North Carolina system struggling to cope. Whole departments have been reduced to only programs, while professors’ salaries have shrunk amid ballooning classroom sizes, and, of course, more promised tuition hikes.

Corporatized administration of the UNC system

Since the birth of the Occupy Movement, much of the nation’s working class has begun to organize, taking action against the austerity measures degrading public resources. These efforts have sprouted with the recognition that confronting politicians and the one percent to whom they are beholden is crucial to bringing about positive social change. North Carolinian students’ struggle against these austerity measures, as across the rest of the nation, illustrates the 99%’s impassioned resistance against the corporatization of the public sphere.

A broad set of practices, corporatization refers to the transfer of state-owned resources to the control of private interests, meaning business management techniques dominate the way decisions are made in order to make the institution run more “efficiently” from a money-making perspective. Corporatization is the precursor to full-on privatization, in which public institutions are not owned by the state — and thus no longer accountable to the general public – and their shares can be traded in the stock exchange, where the more money you have, the more say you get in a company. In North Carolina and elsewhere, corporate executives running the show with their budget cuts are making public higher education less and less obtainable for the young people they are tasked with serving.

The University of North Carolina system in particular is comprised of seventeen campuses. On each, a board of trustees appoints members to be part of the Board of Governors, the main governing body tasked with making UNC system-wide decisions. Even a casual glance at the profiles of the members on the BoG makes it noticeable that most of its members are businessmen and lawyers. Very few of the board members have educational backgrounds or currently play any role in the day-to-day functioning of education itself. So why is it that these businessmen get to dictate how we learn and teach?

Part of the answer lies in the broader conservative agenda to defund public education. This is perhaps nowhere more succinctly expressed than in a memo from the U.S. Chamber of Commerce to a Supreme Court Justice as early as 1971, explaining how corporate America must take a leading role in shaping the politics, education, and law of this country. And since the 1970s, sweeping privatization has indeed taken root in public services like hospitals, public transportation, and other previously state-owned resources. Increasingly, the business world has set its sights on public schools. Here, students get a more multicultural and democratic learning experience than they would in a private school, where typically only wealthy, white families can afford to send their kids. The trends of corporatization and privatization thus appear as clear tools for the 1% to both extract as much profit out of an institution as possible with budget cuts and, more insidiously, to instill their ideological leanings in the general population.

CEOs and politicians professing a blatantly conservative agenda have done much damage to the progress that public education has made in North Carolina. Art Pope is now a member of the UNC Advisory Committee of Strategic Directions and has previously served on UNC’s Board of Governors. He is famous for amassing his fortune as the CEO of Variety Wholesalers, a company that owns dollar stores in poor, working-class neighborhoods. Pope’s ownership of Variety Wholesalers already indicates his appetite for profiting at the expense of disadvantaged communities. Outside of his business endeavors, however, Art Pope also has close ties to the Koch brothers, known for bankrolling the Tea Party. Among many of his forays into direct curricular manipulation — at times strongly rebuked — he is well-known for pulling the strings behind the downgrading of the Women and Gender Studies Department at North Carolina State University.

Troublingly, Art Pope is not the only one with a radical rightwing agenda on the UNC Advisory Committee of Strategic Directions. Fred Eshelman, an executive for a multibillion-dollar pharmaceutical company, led the effort to remove the minimum 25% fees cap, a required fund set aside by all UNC campuses used to help students with financial difficulties in the university system. The current NC Speaker of the House, Tom Tillis, is also on the committee. Tillis alone is responsible for a slew of infamous conservative policies including an attempt at overturning of the Racial Justice Act (a law ensuring that a court’s decision to impose the death penalty was not influenced by an individual’s race), the introduction of Amendment One (a controversial anti-gay amendment to the state’s constitution), and many more anti-civil rights policies.

The Strategic Advisory Committee versus anti-austerity students

Recently, the UNC Board of Governors tasked a Strategic Advisory Committee to plan out the next five years of the UNC system. The committee is comprised of ten university administrators, eight business leaders, seven members of the BoG, four state representatives — and only a single student and faculty member each. This committee is meant to replace the old UNC Tomorrow model of strategic planning used in the past.

The UNC Tomorrow model was undoubtedly more democratic. Its meetings were held around North Carolina at different times, encouraging input from all parts of the state. Contrastingly, the UNC Advisory Committee on Strategic Directions only holds public meetings in Chapel Hill, restricting access to the rest of the UNC campuses. The UNC Tomorrow model took a year to complete and had a two-hour time frame for discussion in each meeting. The current Committee only lasts a few months and time for discussion is far more restricted.

Once Erskine Bowles — the creator of the UNC Tomorrow model — finished his term as president of the UNC system and the conservative Tom Ross came into power, the rightwing businessmen on the BoG capitalized upon the opportunity to end the town hall style of planning in the UNC Tomorrow model. They hastened to introduce a quick and easy route toward the corporate world’s agenda for public education: to make it as exclusive of working class people as possible. Part of the corporate world’s effort to reform education has been the dismantlement of liberal arts departments in favor of building bigger business departments and economy-based career paths. This formula is especially disastrous for schools with a strong tradition in the arts, like UNC Greensboro and the North Carolina School of the Arts.

But corporate influence in the UNC system will not go unchallenged. Students from across the state of North Carolina are organizing a student union to illuminate the shadowy corporate hijacking of public education and to speak out against it.

The North Carolina Student Power Union (NCSPU) began as a coalition called NC Defend Education last winter. The union’s concerns made headlines this year when students and faculty across the state disrupted the Board of Governors’ meeting in February to raise their silenced concerns, and again after an 8.8% tuition hike was passed.

Building upon these direct actions, NCSPU has since formulated a clear list of immediate demands which include: (1) that the UNC Tomorrow model be reintroduced; (2) that Art Pope be removed from the Strategic Advisory Committee; (3) that the Committee be more representative of the socioeconomic backgrounds of North Carolinians; (4) that this new committee be free of corporate and private interests; (5) that the state of North Carolina lives up to its constitutional promise of keeping education “as free as practicable,” and (6) that the BoG reinstate the 25% minimum cap of tuition revenues for need-based financial aid. These demands were made clear to the Advisory Committee as well as UNC system chancellors in a letter mailed this October. The Committee and the BoG have added two new members to the Advisory Committee since the letter was delivered: one student and one faculty member. Their response shows their willingness to respond to the union’s concerns, but the new members are still immensely outweighed, leaving NCSPU’s demand for adequate student and faculty representation still largely unfulfilled.

As any organizer understands, building social movements takes time. And time is limited for students attending a four-year university. But the student power movement — led by NCSPU at home in North Carolina and innumerable groups across the world — cannot dwindle when affordable public education is so thoroughly under attack. The corporate executives serving on education boards across the nation are doing everything they can to restrict access to public education, but students in North Carolina are refusing to allow the corporate world to infect public universities with its ideology. The destructive relationship between moneyed executives and corrupt politicians is especially apparent within the UNC system administration, where corporate executives like Art Pope contributed to the current disaster, and corrupt politicians like Tom Tillis push to further empower them.

The student union movement has only just begun in North Carolina, but the small, symbolic victories that it has already had showcases its continued commitment to stand in solidarity with students, faculty, and workers around the world battling hardships caused by the 1%.

Jonathan Lyle is a junior at The University of North Carolina at Greensboro. He is studying Urban Planning and Sociology and is an organizer for the North Carolina Student Power Union in Greensboro.

The diagram is deceptively simple. First fear erupts from a threat to the current social order. It then justifies emergency action to expunge this threat. Privacy or other rights are given up for a supposed neutralization of the threat. Pacified, we believe ourselves safe and adjust to a new, less free society. Then the cycle repeats to generate more profits for the industries that “keep us safe.”

But there are two specific wrinkles to this general outline. First, the status of ideas and the recent attacks on the university. Second, the normalization of crisis to create a society always “up in the air.”

Attack the Students

Students have historically been at the forefront of social movements: the 1968 general strike in France, anti-Vietnam protests in America, and most recently the Quebec anti-austerity protests this year. In each of these examples criticized governments passed legislation granting extraordinary powers allowing police to suppress the free speech of students. And each time, the students’ free speech spread throughout society, galvanizing popular attacks on social injustice.

Seen in this light, the police attacks on student protesters at UC Davis and UC Berkeley during Occupy should come as no surprise. This infamous photo shows Lt. John Pike, a Davis police officer, pepper spraying seated students. At UC Berkeley the university police beat and dragged protesters by their hair, including a professor of English. UC police Captain Margo Bennett claimed, “The individuals who linked arms and actively resisted, that in itself is an act of violence… linking arms in a human chain when ordered to step aside is not a nonviolent protest.”

While Bennett’s claim is factually and historically wrong, what is more troubling is the worldview it reveals. To dissent is already to be violent. Crucially, this framework also enables a particular kind of economy based on fear.

They Actually Named It “Create and Capture”

In the last year there have been a rash of news reports about the FBI creating terror plots in order to “solve” them, circularly justifying their counter-terrorism budgets. The reports document how FBI informants, usually criminals working in exchange for a reduced sentence or money (as much as $100,000 an assignment according to RT), target individuals based on their First Amendment protected political speech. If the informant thinks the individual can be flipped to consider an act of terrorism, he pursues the target. The individuals in question are generally so confused and disorganized (and sometimes even mentally disabled) that such scenarios would be laughable were it not for the consequences. In one case, it took 11 months of persuading and a $250,000 offer to create a “terrorist” who, it must be noted, refused to kill women and children. The individual in question still did not agree until he lost his job and decided the money was worth it.

While killing for money is clearly indefensible, the opportunity to make that decision would not have been possible without the FBI fronting the money, the guns, the plans, and the resources. Comparing these supposed terrorists’ crimes to our government’s extra-judicial drone strikes is revealing. We routinely target weddings and funerals in Pakistan, killing women and children as well as adult men. We also practice a technique (first invented by Hamas) called “double-tapping,” in which we fire a second attack at first-aid responders attempting to give medical assistance.

The fear economy is not restricted to the FBI. The NYPD and CIA jointly spied on American Muslim student groups and houses of prayer “over a more than six-year period” and “failed to yield a single terrorism investigation or even a single lead.” Perhaps responding to the failure of their “special Demographics Unit” in exposing any terror plots, the NYPD and CIA proceeded to jointly coordinate a program called “Create and Capture.” Counterpunch explains a standard M.O.:

Shamiur Rahman (age 19) had been arrested a few times for drug possession. To erase this record, the NYPD told him to spy on students at John Jay College and at area mosques. He was told to “bait” Muslims into saying incriminating things.

When the supposed bogeyman does not appear, the authorities produce him for us. They keep us safe from horrors of their own creation, and in the process demand we give up our Constitutional rights – and then thank them for the privilege of doing so.

Historical Echoes: But They’re Just Muslims Communists

Fear-based politics is not new. In 1964 a young Catholic student named Mario Savio had recently arrived on UC Berkeley’s campus. Before attending Berkeley he faced down the Ku Klux Klan to help blacks register to vote in the South. Upon attending Berkeley and finding free speech under assault, he joined the non-violent Free Speech Movement to challenge a campus-wide prohibition on political speech.

Prior to the movement the FBI had already begun intensive surveillance operations on students and professors. Two initiatives stand out. Under the Responsibilities Program the FBI funneled scant (and oftentimes knowingly false) allegations against “liberal” or “radical” professors to state governors. The governors enlisted university officials to investigate and terminate these professors’ contracts under the cover of thwarting communism. Almost one thousand professors lost their jobs in the 1950s as a result of allegations they were never aware of and unable to defend themselves against.

The FBI also expanded its operations against students, creating the “Security Index,” a list of Americans to be detained indefinitely in the event of a national emergency. The FBI targeted individuals on the basis of dissenting political speech, and with the Free Speech Movement picking up steam, they soon began listing its members as well.

Economic Echoes, Too

The fear machine has a real, economic basis behind it as well. Then-UC President Clark Kerr had lifted a ban on communist and socialist speakers. Author Seth Rosenfeld, whose book Subversives forms the foundation of this historical analysis, paraphrases Kerr’s explanation: “the university is not engaged in making ideas safe for students, it’s engaged in making students safe for ideas. He believed that if students were well educated, they could hear ideas from any point of view and then make the right decisions.”

The FBI detested this approach for its fear-based reasons. Ronald Reagan, then running against incumbent Pat Brown for California’s governorship, had a long history of informing for the FBI against supposedly dangerous Hollywood actors and actresses. Upon winning the race Reagan secured Kerr’s dismissal, acting on false allegations compiled in similar fashion to the Responsibilities Program. Notably, “a lot of people also forget that Reagan was the first person to institute tuition at the University of California, which, before him, had been free to all people who were able to get into the California university system.”

We see similar economic incentives for fear at work today. Alameda County, which supported Reagan’s demonization of the free speech protestors as “filthy,” recently approved a $32 million contract for Corizon Health Inc., a prison services provider, based solely on a two-page letter from Alameda County Sheriff’s Office. The county now faces a civil grand jury recommendation to develop actual oversight policies on spending and awarding private contracts.

Interestingly, the Alameda County Sheriffs are the only police force to have brought explosive tear gas canisters to last year’s October Occupy Oakland protests, where they lacerated the spleen of Iraq war veteran Kayvan Sabeghi. As of October this year, the Alameda Sheriff’s office is calling for drone-based permanent surveillance of the skies over Alameda, doubtless with a fat contract awaiting some lucky private contractor.

The fear economy is larger than one or two governmental decisions in California. In America today one in five jobs is guard labor,  where an American is paid to monitor someone else, usually another American. The global surveillance industry is valued at approximately $5 billion annually, with much of its growth coming in the last decade. Oftentimes, as was the case when Nokia-Siemens’ technology helped Iran repress the 2009-2010 protests against rigged elections, the technology repressive regimes use to identify and execute protestors comes from technology companies based in the U.S., U.K., and the West more generally.

Permanent Crisis

We can now see the logic of the fear economy come full circle. A dangerous “outsider” (frequently created by those our taxes pay to keep us safe) presents a challenge to our safety. The authorities assure us they will remove the threat, but only if we give up essential rights. Rights taken, the government and private corporations deploy extraordinary powers and reap deep financial gains. The industry expands, and draws repressive regimes together with so-called democracies as it opens up new markets abroad with surveillance techniques perfected at home.

Two moments from this original diagram have collapsed. First, we no longer give up our rights. They are taken from us in advance. Second, we no longer adjust to a less free society. The next round of fear begins before the current one ends.

With technological innovation and trade both increasing in speed, the distance between these moments shrinks until they become indistinguishable. The rights we think we enjoy do not exist as we like to imagine them:

“Why are you guys so anti-dictators? Imagine if America was a dictatorship. You could let 1% of the people have all the nation’s wealth. You could help your rich friends get richer by cutting their taxes. And bailing them out when they gamble and lose. You could ignore the needs of the poor for health care and education. Your media would appear free, but would secretly be controlled by one person and his family. You could wiretap phones. You could torture foreign prisoners. You could have rigged elections. You could lie about why you go to war. You could fill your prisons with one particular racial group, and no one would complain. You could use the media to scare the people into supporting policies that are against their interests.”

Today it is hard to find an example of politics that is not crisis politics. Even funding our own government’s operation is a crisis issue: “the fiscal cliff.” This constant crisis has at least two important consequences. First, we are unable to distinguish true crises from manufactured ones. Despite continued rebuttal of every talking point climate deniers can find, the House recently appointed Lamar Smith, a climate science denier as well as the primary sponsor of the Internet censoring bill SOPA, to lead the Committee on Science, Space, and Technology.

Second, we are unable to rationally discuss ideas. All politics takes the form of the fear machine: a dangerous outside threatens a vulnerable inside, and any person—even an Iraq war veteran—can flip from one location to the other at a moment’s notice. Speaking produces suspicion, and free speech and reasonable debate are entirely evacuated. How can one learn in this climate?

At this point in time there are significant questions we should be asking. How stable is a system that exists only as a continual string of emergencies? Who profits from suppressing our ability to discuss ideas freely? And perhaps most importantly, do we want to live in a society whose authorities primarily see the free assembly of its citizens as dangerous, violent, and unclean?

In the coming struggles students may play a pivotal role in jamming the cogs of the fear economy. Already existing in common by virtue of the dormitory lifestyle, their traditional emphasis on learning and open inquiry provide a crucial battleground from which we may begin to unwork the fear that closes around our voices, threatening to strangle us just as we begin to speak.

MLK photo used with permission from Tina Dupuy

Bobo is a writer, artist, and aspiring business owner. He currently researches human-machine interaction at Duke University.