After the politically motivated forced abdication of Tom Ross, the UNC-System Board of Governors installed Margaret Spellings as its president. After being crowned on March 1, Spellings set out on her 100-day ceremonial survey of the lands. Although she’s only been in office for six weeks, we do not have the time to sit idly by and wait as she lays siege to our universities. Spellings has already made her vision for the future of education abundantly clear in multiple instances across her career.
Her 2005 Commission on the Future of Higher Education lauded the for-profit education industry — notorious for preying on veterans and lower classes— for its“aggressive, outcomes-based approach” and called for a national database of college students to track their progress. In a 2014 Wall Street Journal op-ed, she dreams of a “consumer-driven education,”which imagines parents and students as “buyers” and teachers as “independent agents who contract to get a job done with students.” During her remarks at the Board of Governors retreat, she referred to university leadership as “managers of sophisticated enterprises”. Besides statements, she indicates her vested interests via membership on boards such as the Apollo Education Group — the holding company for the infamous University of Phoenix — and the Ceannate Corporation — a student loan collection agency.
With neoliberal ideology, Spellings wants to mold universities as businesses. Founded by the Austrian School of Economics and implemented by politicians like Reagan and Thatcher, neoliberalism asserts that all components of human existence — from knowledge, to care, to the water we drink — should be privatized, made available to only those who can pay for them and thus exist only for the sake of profit.
Higher education will be enslaved to the flippant forces of the free market. Diplomas will be seen only as human capital; critical and creative thinking will be valued insofar as they generate money. Austerity measures will gut integral academic departments left and right for the sake of abstract banalities like accountability, effectiveness and affordability. These effects have already begun, as historically black colleges are on the chopping block and online courses proliferate, which dilutes substantive content and forgoes social knowledge-creation.
Friends, we cannot allow this to happen. We must organize now to confront Spellings and tell her that she is not a voice for us. She should resign and be replaced by someone who wasn’t chosen by a cabal. To be frank, with only a dozen protesters, our attempt on Wednesday was feeble and pathetic.
Many students wrongly attribute the sparse protest attendance to our lack of activist history and culture, since we are a STEM school. Sadly, our memories seem to fail us. We forgot 1970 when 6,000 students marched to the State Capitol since the governor supported bombing Cambodia. We forgot 2001 when thousands again rallied against the General Assembly to protest their proposed 7 percent cut to the UNC System. I’m astonished at how we can’t even remember the successful Hofmann Forest campaignjust a couple years ago.
Speaking as a student in engineering, STEM majors shouldn’t be stereotyped as apolitical, pencil-pushing egg heads. MIT, another renowned STEM school, also has a strong history of activism where students protested military-related research during the Vietnam War. Technical knowledge works in conjunction with, not in opposition to, political critique.
Static methodologies and lack of infrastructure cripple NC State’s activism. The millennial politics of activism is one of defense; it waits and predictably reacts rather than striking first. College activists fetishize immediate, symbolic actions and overemphasize emotional assertion, which does nothing to challenge oppressive structures, rather than embracing strategic, long-term political thinking. We are ahistorically adrift, lashing out with only the vaguest shred of what we’re doing.
Demonstrations often take place so that kids can put a narcissistic picture on their snapstories being cool and antagonistic. Social media has made activism nihilistic and diffusesince now people get their satisfaction from signing a change.org petition or posting a “fight the man” status that only eats up bandwidth.
Building sustainable infrastructure is the solution. Student organization turnover time is quick as we are supposed to graduate after four years. But to effectively counter the well-financed forces of neoliberalism, we need to dig a network of trenches.
Rather than trendiness, we need long-term strategy that moves from conceiving problems to suggesting positive solutions. More than boring spectacles, we need students willing to cooperate and campaign over long periods of time to meet the ends of a political project. Instead of romanticizing fair-weather fist-waving, we must institutionalize our resistance for the sake of continuity. We are not without precedent; Students for a Democratic Society— the nation’s premier leftist and anti-war student organization — has a dormant chapter at NC State that can and should be revived.
Wolfpack, we can make a real difference. Together we can oust Spellings before she has the chance to rip apart our beloved schools.
