MaxSpeak Assignment Desk: The New Political Economy of U.S. Universities

There was a bit floating around on Facebook about universities. I tried and failed to dig up, nor do I recall the author. It alleges that universities (really the elite ones) have become hedge funds presiding over government-funded research, the fruits of which are reaped by private investors, including the universities’ funds themselves. Social finance through public revenues and tax concessions, de-socialization of the rewards for the benefit of the wealthy. The educational mission takes a back seat.

This can help to explain the degree of violence directed at the student encampments protesting Israel’s rape of Gaza and, less overtly, the West Bank. The downgrading of education parallels the absence of concern for student and faculty safety at the hands of riot police called in by administrations, thanks in part to the clamor of MAGA political demagogues in the U.S. Congress. Others have said the brutality is worse than the good old days of campus anti-war uprisings. I couldn’t say. Nobody has been shot dead yet.

As a sometimes-economist, this idea flashes signals about incentives that line up to produce the sorry spectacles that we are witnessing. In the private universities with the huge endowments, a source is said to be super-rich, pro-Zionist Jewish donors such as Bill Ackman. I suspect this to be a reductionist inference that reflects to some extent the thread of antisemitism that can be found in the agitation, very much an irrelevance in the context of the carnage in Gaza, in my view.

The endowments constitute a powerful incentive for administrators to shield the composition of their holdings from public scrutiny, especially that of knowledgeable students and faculty. The use of public resources for private capital accumulation is a kind of paradigm of the System writ large that the authorities are at pains to conceal. In this context, the minor university connections to Israel itself are much more the tail than the dog. It isn’t new for students to seek any accessible handle to pursue their concerns. In the anti-war movement, campus ROTC programs served a similar, dubious function.

Israel is taking advantage of all this but is not necessarily a prime mover. In the same vein, Israel’s role in U.S. global imperial reach is more about the U.S. and Capitalism than about Zionism. Just as world Jewry is the human shield for Zionism, Israel is that for U.S. imperialism. Anti-imperialism is vulnerable to smears as antisemitism.

The big public universities lack those big endowments, but the perversion of public resources for the sake of private gain is there as well, perhaps in more outrageous form since the extent of public revenue for the state schools is based on regressive taxation. The flow of benefit relative to cost is more counter-redistributive. At the same time, lesser institutions are being ground down to the status of trade schools, as purportedly less-functional departments in the humanities are diminished or eliminated entirely.

There was writing in the 60s to paint universities as capitalist firms, in which professors were the proletariat and students were commodities, or whatnot. I also recall a prominent essay entitled “The Student As Ni*ger.” There was loose talk about “student power” as an analog to Black power.

While universities may have evolved in a negative direction, resistance has evolved too. There are dozens, maybe hundreds of encampments. Police brutality is manufacturing many future, lifelong radicals. My own organization, the Democratic Socialists of America (my attachment is thin, but I digress), has the inside track on the campus agitation. It will grow. The labor angle, unionization of graduate students, parallels activism in the private sector. I would imagine that faculties are thinking more about labor rights, either through unionization or by means of their AAUP chapters.

As awful as Israel’s incursion in Gaza is, something much bigger may have been touched off.

There is a book here to be written on the university context, hence my title.