 All right, so welcome everybody. Tonight's event is called the other University debt crisis, debunking myths and organizing for action. A little bit about our group. We've been meeting since fall 2020 I joined the group, this past since. This past spring and it came out of the labor notes few working group and the debt collective, and just people in general being interested in university debt and trying to gather information somehow finding their way to each other. We've been trying to find ways to organize around the issues of university debt and bring people together and demystify what seems like a really complex and weighted topic because it gets into financial issues that seem hard to understand. So we're trying to bring that more widely meet that more widely accessible. So what is university debt and why does it exist. And I think a lot of people on this call already have a basic understanding of this I'm going to go through it fairly quickly. We have a lot of documentation that goes more in depth into this, but university debt has its roots in the lower public funding that we have today for public higher education and private higher education that there's lower public funding available to public universities. And that means an increased reliance on tuition and on other sources of private funding, including institutional debt so institutional debt is generally created by issuing bonds when the university or university system issues bonds, and it stretches payments for these bonds. For a long time often decades I, I'm personally I didn't introduce myself but I'm at the University of Colorado Boulder and the University of Colorado has said that stretches into the 2050s already. And that's for both principle and interest and as part of their 2020 restructuring, they stretched it even further into the future to lower their payments today, but have payments longer into the future and a lot of universities have been doing that. So the, the bonds are issued they're issued in large amounts but broken down so is the University of Colorado Colorado for instance might issue $50 million of debt and sell it in chunks of 10,000 or 50,000 or something like that. So these parts are bought by private investors and they're, which sometimes those can be mutual mutual funds or those can be pension funds or just actual private people, it depends who's who's investing in these things. They are secured against university property and the tuition and fees of students so that gets into the actual, what do the, the rules of the bond look like. And that that's individual for each bond that's released and the investors receive principle and interest payments regularly, mostly annually sometimes more frequently than that. In many years they just get interest, sometimes they get both just kind of depends. So, why do we object to it. So, the terms of the debt, as far as what's the interest rate that that an institution is going to be paying on their debt and can they say that they're triply rated or doubly rated has a lot to do with how desired their bonds will be on the market. And it's decided by these credit rating agencies. And the priorities of the credit rating agencies they had these big matrices that they can look at and decide how they feel that university should be rated and it's all based on the kind of neoliberal view of education as it could be fiscally streamlined and efficient and not looking at educational quality. It's really looking at how are the finances of the university working exclusively. And so these universities get into straight out saying in board meetings for instance, that we are trying to make sure that the credit rating agencies like our priority is the credit rating. agencies and making sure that they approve of what we're doing and give us top rating because then we can get cheaper debt. And so it ends up making these credit rating agencies which are private, have nothing to do with public good, the public good of education, and making a lot of decisions about how higher education, specifically public higher education is run. And we see public higher education as a public good, not a market or private good. And so, to shift all of this responsibility for decision making from the public to these private credit rating agencies that have these very neoliberal agendas and ways that they want to see university structured that are sometimes counter to a real quality of education. It means that there are lots of other reasons to be objective to object to university debt but this is the big one that it changes the priorities of of institutions. And so how do we fight it we're going to go more into that the rest of tonight but summarize as organize research, make information public and demystify complex topics so that's what our group is trying to do. So this is the, the plan for tonight the agenda. Right now you're at the introduction. We're going to go through a little bit more introduction about what this group is and what we've done and then we're going to go into an example. This is Chicago teachers union, and we'll have a representative from them here to present to the group, and then we're going to look at myths. What are the myths around debt and specifically around institutional debt. We'll go into breakouts to talk about those myths and then we'll come back and wrap up. And I'm going to pass it now to rich and Joanna. Folks, I'm rich from Salem State University. And I want to talk about the follow up on April 15. We had a debt reveal day on which 26 universities had collected and shared data. And basically it confirmed that universities, our campuses are really buried in amount of debt. The chart below doesn't show the amount of debt per se, but it shows the annual debt payments. The total debt for campuses right now across the US is $151 billion. And as you can see, in the biggest systems California is 900 plus million dollars a year just in debt service payments. That's really a significant factor debt reveal day also helped us reveal that the average unweighted debt service, what campuses pay as a proportion of their annual budget for public universities is about 5% and for very limited sample private universities about 4%. Can I get the next slide. Just what that means in concrete numbers was an analysis of the nine state universities in Massachusetts. This is what a full time undergraduate pays per on an average per year. When we started doing this and we found Salem State the average was $3,310. We were totally blown away we couldn't think we figured it was miscalculated, but it wasn't. And then we found out that we were only the third worst in the state. So people pay from 4300 down to 1600 per student per year. And that's an incredible amount. But what's really amazing is that getting all of this information Tracy was talking about it seems opaque and impossible. This took an average of less than two hours for groups of people who are not experts to do this. It's a tool for self empowerment, organize students higher education workers. It makes it possible to state analysis to bring campus together against austerity. And the other thing to look at is, like I'm saying, the schools pay four to five as an average percent of their budget what does this mean. We came up with the notion of instructional harm. And if you go down to the next slide, we can see that as well. This is the worksheets that we used. These could be done and we have links to all the sources and explanations and how to do it. It literally takes very little time. But for the University of Illinois, for example, where the ratio is only 2.1%, the debt service is enough to pay for all the cuts instructional and student services for 2018-2019. At the University of Wisconsin, it's 3%, which doesn't seem that big, but it's the equivalent of the entire budget for the School of Education. At Salem State and University of Colorado, it's 10%. At Salem State, that means a student is coming out with $12,000 in student debt just for debt service. Approximately a quarter of everything that students pay goes to debt service. And while Salem State's faculty has shrunk from 350 to 300 is now targeting to 250, using the funds that are now used to pay debt service would allow annual reductions in tuition and maintenance and or hiring of 125 10-year track faculty. So the institutional harm in this is higher tuition, restricted classes, and all of incredible amounts of damage that come across in the University as a result of this, in addition to which I want to re-emphasize how much that really translates directly into student debt. And then just to conclude briefly, this is not hard to do. This handy dandy free do-it-yourself worksheet is available. I'm not sure if the link is on here, but we'll provide it. There's a toolkit that gives you advice on how to do it, references and all of that. It's done in virtually no time. And what this means is that it allows you to develop a core faculty and students who understand this stuff can speak publicly and help mobilize students. It's not an intellectual exercise. It's organizing your campus against campus debt and the harm it causes and undermine the way it undermines public education itself. Understanding this debt really helps for stronger organizing and building power on campuses. So let me turn it over to Joanna. You're muted. Thanks, Rich. I'm going to talk a little bit about the next steps in this organizing around debt. First off, I just want to mention that, you know, when we started revealing the debt, both on, you know, April 15, but in other forums, it was shocking not only to faculty but to students, even to administrators to some extent. And it started to become part of the vocabulary when we talk about what's wrong with our campus, what's wrong with funding and of public higher ed, people started to understand it at a very concrete level. What we've been doing in a couple of states, it's the Massachusetts public higher ed system, and in the Colorado University of Colorado system, we're running pilots. This fall we'll be forming groups to conduct some, you know, more in depth debt audits on each of our campuses, and use the process and the information revealed to raise awareness of the debt burden on our campuses and its consequences as Rich spoke about. Also, we can join together across our campuses to demand that this, for instance, the state of Colorado in the state of Massachusetts pay for the buildings they own through essentially tax dollars, not through student fees, not through capital improvement piece that just add to student debt. We'll report on the progress of these pilots that are going to be taking place this fall, the lessons learned, what we do with the information in our next forum. With regard to future directions for organizing against debt, we created a survey that actually some of you here in this forum have completed. I'm going to pop in a second they link into the chat. It's a 10 minute survey includes questions about key issues that you are interested surrounding debt. What would you like to organ organize around that could include change at the local campus level fighting for change at the state level or national level. We also have questions about the tactics you're interested in exploring in the supports you need to do this work. You can take this survey as an individual as a group, and we encourage you to complete it if you haven't done so already by the end of September. At our next forum in October will share sort of what you know what people's thoughts were and learn how that we can support the work that we're all doing, you know through through tool kits and other resources that we built. All right, thanks and next slide I think it's after a lady. I think one of the things that makes debt. By the way, my name's Laney and I'm really happy to be here with you all. One of the things that makes debt. Such a crazy issue isn't just that it's a, a ton of money as the slide that rich showed you know hundreds of thousands of millions of dollars that go away from our campuses. It isn't just that every dollar that we borrow gets paid back as a dollar plus with interests and fees. One of the things that's also the problem is that it's almost always the first item of budgeting business in a university's budget, that the money gets set aside in some cases years in advance for to repay back debt and this creates a big problem and what we're super, super lucky to get to here tonight from the Chicago from from Kurt from the Chicago teachers union and the Chicago teachers union a bunch of us on this call we're just watching like with just huge glowing eyes as the summer as the Chicago teachers union kind of put up a fight against that, that prioritization that debt gets paid first. And they spent the summer organizing around the need for COVID relief funds that came to the city of Chicago and Chicago public schools to go, not according to the mayor's vision to pay back the banks for money borrowed. But to go to the students and educators of Chicago so I'm very happy and thrilled to get to turn it over to Kurt, who is going to tell us a little bit about how they were how the Chicago teachers managed to organize against this very abstract and lofty things such as debt to get to build power. Kurt, take it away. Hey, good evening everybody. I get my name's Kurt Hildendorf from the legislative and policy director at Chicago teachers union. I got to say it was very trippy thing to think about protesting at University of Illinois Board of Trustees meetings when I was an undergrad two decades ago. And now I'm talking about talking with a bunch of people who are talking about University of Illinois debt, and it was a little bit of a like whiplash situation because I would if you had asked me. Then if I would ever be doing this I probably would have flipped you off and yelled at you because that seemed like the most insane thing I could have imagined. But here we are. To Elaine's point I mean I think the first thing is is like why did we do it, like we view it as we don't have a choice. Because, like what we have to do like our job as a union and our job is labor collectively is to is to advocate for real policies that transform people's lives. We have to have a broad mission that considers, and not not only considers but embraces the common good. And that's particularly important in a time of crisis and we're at a time of crisis right now you've got the global pandemic, more than 600,000 people have died in the United States and that's just the official count. We're going into across the world that we have students who are, you know facing a massive debt crisis of their own and it's being piled on the top university level or a higher ed. And so, like, there's clearly a reason to do this, and the biggest successes we've had historically have come precisely at times when we fight during a crisis and advocate for concrete material improvements to society as a whole like that is that has to be the mission. And it only makes sense because the right wings bargaining position is to oppose everything even hinting at decency, so the wealthiest can hoard even more. And so, in our case what we have to put out an alternative like we can get, you know, can we can move people because we're charming just empathetic human beings, but also we have to have a vision that we can organize people to. And that you know we're doing mass politics we have to have mass movements and massive numbers of people. We have to be broad bold and strategic like thinking small is not going to advance the project. At this time like we have to, you know, we have to be bigger and bolder and people have hinted at it so far tonight, you have to build coalitions, you have to represent your marrow, your members narrow interest and the interest of our communities. And it, and we have to pick fights with powerful people to expose and weaken them and win. And that's really sort of like the high level view of how we tend to think about this so a lady sent me some questions. And I wanted to sort of answer them because I think it's helpful for describing sort of what we've done. The question was, how did CT use campaign to use federal coven relief funds for relief, not debt service get started. And how did the campaign progress. So just for a quick background, Chicago will receive $4 billion of American rescue plan funds between the city and the Chicago public schools. That's a huge chunk of money with the potential to have like incredibly positive impacts on people's lives, if it's, you know, put to those purposes. We have to put it on us to play offense, we have to play offense we have to make demands, we have to make those demands where people really need, and we have to make decision makers respond like we have to force that. That's the fight. And it's from this perspective that CTU became a charter member of the right to recovery coalition in Chicago and I want to be clear that this has not been a CTU only activity this has been, you know the Chicago teachers union and, you know, SCI you a variety of community organizations that have been part of this it started when the pandemic started I mean this thing got fired up like a week after sort of the world came to a stop whatever date that came to stop, you know in March of 2020. And you know the the coalition was about ensuring people continue to work, continue to have health care, continue to have housing, and that they survived. And then when federal recovery dollars became part of the game and that advocating with those go to Chicago wins and not chase bank. And so the actual campaign started in 2020 not in 2021. And that infrastructure was built for a right to recovery so that's sort of like why you know why we got started and how it started. Now the next question I think is a key one in that is how did you interest people in organizing against debt. And the answer to that is that the coalition hasn't really talked about debt at all. We've talked about an organized around the need for recovery. We've talked about an organized around not paying off Wall Street banks that have made billions, while thousands of Chicago wins lost their family their loved ones. And this is tricky. And the reason why we don't focus on debt is because debt is hard in this country because there's a heavy moral element to it. If you don't pay it you're on virtuous they're like I don't know if anybody on this call read debt the first 5000 years I did I tried to get my AP USA or my AP World History students to read it. That was a trip. But like, you know, there's a long history of like this is as a moral element. It used to be a jubilee we get rid of it everybody go about their lives. Well now it's about discipline, morality, all of those things. And the question however can be reframed. What do we need in this moment. Why can we afford it and how does it solve a problem. So we say that Chicago got $4 billion in rescue funds so that schools don't that don't have social workers and school nurses coming out of a pandemic should get them and get them now. And there's also been an element of counterposing the mayor's strategies with what people want. So she wants to pay banks. She wants to expand the Chicago Police Department. She wants her almost all of her first federal you know relief money to do that for police overtime and the people are sick dying out of work and losing their homes. So you create the villain right like you've got to have that fight to pick you've got to have the villain and you know we put her at the center at the center part of it. So, the next question is what did the organizing for this campaign look like and what were the nitty gritty strategies and tactics. So, I always try to think of these things as there's an inside game and an outside game. You put the mayor or you know whoever it is maybe it's the provost maybe it's the university and president. You know whoever you need to put as the central villain, and then and then those folks who don't get on board with what you need they need to be punished in some way. So that's the inside and outside game. So the inside game is, you know with the city council because theoretically in Chicago, there is a weak mayor strong council now that hasn't been history for anybody knows the history of the city of Chicago but theoretically that's it, and right the mayor right now is weak. She has a hard time getting to 26 votes on a lot of things. There was the closest vote on a city budget in decades last year. And so now she's at risk. So the city council and the city council are going to be in the same boat with the city council members because they see it see the same thing we do that their constituents need help, and that paying back Jamie Diamond isn't the path forward. So what we did, you know to this idea of having an alternative is that the coalition introduced what we call the Chicago rescue plan. It's an ordinance that directs how the city spell spends federal, you know, American rescue plan rescue plan dollars we've got 14 co sponsors on the on the ordinance out of 50. extensive discussions with other alders and, you know, our older people, including the Black Caucus and Latino Caucus in the Chicago City Council. And we've been trying to make people take sides even if they don't take a side on the ordinance. They might say, well, I'm not taking a position on this, but I support these three or four things. And it hasn't moved yet, but the budget season in Chicago was just ramping up. So part of this was positioning something that we could campaign on for months in advance prior to when the actual real sort of like legislative process gets down to brass tax. And so we're really positioned well to make an impact. Now the outside game is the organizing part. And so that's been direct actions and canvassing in support of the Chicago Rescue Plan and against the mayor's proposed uses, right? Paying debt and funding the police. And which by the way, as people are talking about debt, like in the city of Chicago, police misconduct settlements are a huge chunk of the city's debt because the city will borrow money to pay police misconduct settlements. And so it's borrowing money to pay off borrowed money. And it's been sort of a nightmare. So there's like really a lot of like very nefarious elements to this. And so the coalition, you know, when we would canvas in mayoral allies wards, we would generate hundreds of postcards to all there's and to the mayor. And we targeted place where there are, there is some real risk, right? Like where there is, there are, you know, the remap for the, that is happening. I get that that's probably not a thing for the board of trustees at your university, but you know, if it is something that might be a situation like there was a remap, it's a decennial sentences. And so we've got activity, people out knocking on doors in these districts and in these wards. And that scares the bejesus out of elected officials whose primary objective is self-preservation. And so this organizing is going to continue throughout the next few months of part of the, of part of, you know, the budget season in Chicago. So the idea was to have, you know, a central alternative to what the mayor is putting forth and to go out and organize people in support of it and against her position. And that's, that's sort of been the core idea. So I know I've gone on a little while. So the three, the three biggest successes of the campaign and the three biggest challenges, I don't have an answer to that yet because there's still a long ways to go and how this plays out. But the fact that there is an ordinance moving forward that actually directs the city of Chicago, how it would have to spend its relief dollars. And I'm talking about support for homeless services for treatment, not trauma, which is to have mental health support and professionals go out instead of police to respond to someone who's having a mental health crisis that would include job training. That would include like a reparations pilot, a universal basic income pilot, like a variety of things that people need. That's actually, you know, codified in ordinance that people have been organizing on and having conversations about. The challenges that, you know, the challenges as always, how do you get to the votes you need, right? Like if it's in the city council, it's 26, it might be five votes and, you know, for your board of trustees and they don't wanna buck the president or the provost or the chancellor, whomever, like these are challenges. And can you create a situation where you have to force tough votes, you can get concessions, you can force some of these things to happen, you know, and can you force the university not to reissue debt or can you force the state legislature to increase funding to public education so they don't have to take out debt? Could you think about some other alternatives that would be ways that would not be issuing more bonds that you would have, would be clear? And I see Marissa, your comment in the chat. Absolutely, like you have to have, like you have to have an alternative vision. If you don't, we become nothing more than the right wing, right? Like everybody's opposed to something, right? Like it's they're anti-vaxxers, they're anti-maskers, they're anti-critical race theory. That is it, that's nothing. That's nihilism and that means that like the same, you know, billionaires who were one continue to win. Like unless there's an alternative, like you have to have something they organize, you know, people can get to. So I'll have one more comment and then I'll stop it. If people want to ask questions, I'm happy to take some. Sort of what are the lessons here for organizing in higher ed? Like I just think you've got to play offense and advocate for what students need. Like if your students are paying $4,000 a year in debt service and they're borrowing money to do it, like there has to be some other, you know, there has to be some way. Maybe that means that we have to, you know, have a, do we advocate at the state level for a 20% increase in funding to higher education and tax-rich people to do it? Like make that as the proposal. I don't care if it seems insane. The insane proposal is like, are the Trump tax cuts like make something hard because you've got to have a bargaining position that gets you to that, right? Like how do you end high tuition and debt to fund it? Like what kind of social and academic supports can you get if you, you know, reallocate those funds? Like what is the safety element on campus? Like I'm not an expert on higher education needs and I know that they differ from location to location but the point is to like figure out an issue that is really important to your students and advocate for that because that then now brings in the biggest constituency you have on your side which is thousands of, you know, of students, undergraduates and graduate students who have an interest in this and build coalitions backing those ideas. I think you also have to identify a clear villain who can then be the organizing like focus and, you know, the great thing and the gift that keeps on giving is Rahm Emanuel. Everybody hated that asshole. Like everyone hated him. And like he was easy to get teachers pissed off at him because, you know, the first thing he did was like yank a, you know, yank a 4% raise that had been agreed to in our contract. And he just kept poking and people basically said, nah, we're, we've had it. We're going at him. And that you like that makes the organizing easier. That doesn't become the central point of it, but it becomes a place where you can target and then you can, you can start, you can start building wedges between, you know, say the university president or the chair of the board and other board members or wherever, wherever there else is. But that's going to, that's a crucial part of it. So you've got to have something you organize for a vision for and you've got to have some villains to oppose to get people motivated and then you figure out how to sort of meld those two things together. So I'm going to stop there. Thank you so much for the time tonight. It's very nice to get a chat with all of you. That's awesome. You make it sound so easy. All you need is a vision. You just got to play some offense, get a villain on the line and there you go. Take down neoliberal capitalism. Who's like, we've got Kurt and I think I'm not sure Kurt, if you're planning, we're going to get a chance just if it wasn't for folks that joined on the call later, whatever. We're going to have a chance to get chatty and breakout groups in a little bit, but let's take the opportunity to, if anybody has questions or things they want to address to Kurt, well, he's here on the line right now. Really, really inspiring. Kurt, when we talked about the, we kind of, a lot of folks have, you know, kind of all hail the CTU in this world. And we saw the work that you all have been doing as bringing some necessary hope sauce to people who have been fighting and just kind of struggling to get one foot in front of the other. So it's really, really inspiring and uplifting to have you here on behalf of all of your members. Glad to be here. And I can hang out for a little while longer. My 730 got canceled. So I can hang out for a little. Cool. I probably got till a little after 730. All right. Well, I guess just give another beat of question asking Tom if anybody wants to jump in. You can feel free to type your question in the chat. You can hit stack or you can just unmute yourself and jump in if you have some, oops, CTU specifically. Can I just jump in? Great, thanks. This is Max Page on the Vice President of the Mass Teachers Association. And indeed I agree with that CTU is an inspiration for all of us. Maybe I think you would address this or maybe you can go to a little more detail because I think one of the things that we've been talking about is all the ways to make this understandable to people. It's just, I mean, people, once you know it, you get it, you get the connections. But it is and are some people, some of our members here, Rich and Joanna have been doing a great job in trying to show people how this can be done. But I was just communicating with Rich, getting our campuses to really get this and realize why this is so connected. I'm just wondering how you all did that. I mean, successes, failures in terms of how you help people understand debt has connected so directly to their conditions of work and education. Yeah, so I think the answer is you've got to have people who understand what's going on and understand it. And I don't want to think about how many bond prospectuses I read as something I completely never had any expectation to have to read. And the key thing is to understand the implications of it. You don't have to understand all the covenants, like what law firms involved, what the payment schedule is, like the amortization, you don't understand any of that shit. Sorry, you have to understand unless cursing is allowed, which then perfect. But... Dan right it is. All right, perfect. So I think what we've done is we've tried to put clear, like, and I think folks who opened the discussion that we're sort of hinting at this, what is the implication of having $60 million a year in debt service payments? What do you not get from that? Like, one of the things that we did, starting like almost 10 years ago was like, how much does it cost to get, like how much would it cost the Chicago Public Schools to have a social worker at every building, right? And that's like 600 schools and you need one. And we, our rough estimate is like, salary and benefits is 100,000. So you need $60 million a year to have a social worker in every school, every school in the city of Chicago. And now people are like, oh, I don't have a social worker in my school or I'm on campus, but I don't, I don't get to see like, you know, my campus health service fees $500 and I only get to see a doctor once. Like, what would be some way to, like, put that into terms that people can understand? Like, could you say like, you know, we gave like, we gave $60 million a year, we paid Chase Bank $60 million last year, but we could have had, you know, that could have reduced your tuition $2,000 or something like that. Like put it into some kind of self-interested thing that people can like, grapple with in a way that like, that makes sense to them. And, you know, so that's like, and make it concrete so that people aren't just seeing like, oh, I don't know, 2.5%, you know, Ray, like, no, that doesn't work. Like, unless you're, you know, you should know it, you should know what the implications are. We've got people on our staff whose job it is to, you know, like to project that. And like the way to talk about it is like, what do you get for it? And that I think is what we've been effective at. Now, it doesn't mean that we don't talk about it if we have to, but that it's, there's always a pivot there. So that there's like, you know, and the debt service is a half a billion dollars this year. And here's what it would pay for if we didn't have it, right? Like that I think is always the important thing to get it wide. Because as soon as you start saying numbers like more than a million dollars or two million, people have no idea what that actually means. But 10 social workers, that they get or 10 librarians, that they get. Oops. That's a really, really helpful and fantastic piece. And I think an important lesson, figure out how to talk about this in clear concrete ways in terms that people understand. No one understands $60 billion. No one understands $9 billion. No one really, I mean, very few of us understand a million dollars, but like you get $2,000 of your students tuition or how many more hours a week they have to work at the campus dining hall to pay for that. That make people get that. So thank you so much, Kurt. I think I'm gonna, unless that can't, let's see, are there questions in the chat here? I'm trying to read quickly. I don't believe there are. All right. So we'll, this will keep coming up throughout the evening, but to keep on our schedule, we get to turn it over to Jason Wozniak, who's gonna touch on some of these themes that Kurt was talking about, of why debt is kind of, what makes it difficult to take debt on directly? What are the things about debt that makes it difficult and how do we encounter those and what can we do about it? Jason? Yeah. Thanks, Lenny. Thanks, Kurt. Good to see everyone here, recognizing a lot of different names. I do wanna just go off script a little bit to make a couple of points about what Kurt was saying. In Philadelphia, when we organized around Philadelphia Schools District Debt, we just simply told people, and by people, I mean parents and teachers and other people, that we're paying $300 million a year in debt service. And what could we do with that money? So that was that simple. The other thing, one connection to the campaign in Chicago to Hyred, and I guess I wanna ask everyone on the call, two questions. Do you know how much money your university or your state system has received in federal funding, relief funding? That's the first question. The second question is, do you know how much of that relief funding is going to pay that service? And I think starting with those two basic questions is really important. So in Pennsylvania, where I'm coming from, I recently found out that, I mean, I didn't find out, it was quoted by the chancellor that they're gonna use $12 million of relief funds to pay off debt service. So that right there is a $12 million, where we could say, well, actually that's $12 million could be used for a variety of different things, right? So I think like just asking those two questions right away is really important. Like, do you know how much federal funding you're getting in relief funds for your university and or state system, and how much is that is going to that service? I think if we could find that out, we have an immediate thing to appeal to people with on our local campuses and possibly statewide. So that would be just one connection to make about how might this graph on to what we're talking about here with higher ed. The aim of my talk was to talk about some of the myths that we constantly have to overcome as debt organizers. And part of the problem, and I think Kurt already hinted at this, but part of the problem is that debt has become so common sense and so normalized in our country that it remains failed, that it remains accepted. And so part of our work as organizers is like, how do we defamiliarize this? And how do we delegitimize it? So I think there's two key terms there. How do we make this not be normal and seem not normal, but how do we also delegitimize it? In other words, we could put Margaret Thatcher on her heels and say like, there actually are alternatives, but to do that we have to delegitimize some of these dominant systems that we're concerned with. And so what I wanted to do is just talk about the ways in which as we organize debtors, you often come up against a variety of beliefs or I would call them myths that people will throw at you and say, yes, we need to have this system because of X, Y, or Z. And so strikingly enough, in my organizing, and this is in Philadelphia with teachers and others, but also with individual student debtors. The most striking thing to me is that a lot of the hardest pushback actually doesn't come from conservatives. It comes from liberals and other people who say there are no alternatives and these are some of the myths. Why? And so one of the things I wanted to do was to say, these are some myths that we need to deconstruct in our organizing work. And the quote by Enrique Duzel here in Argentine Liberation Philosophy, I think it's really important that we have to not immediately adopt the criteria of the system that we wanna critique. We need to come up with ways of critiquing the system from outside it or ways that take it apart, not simply adopt the language that's at youth. That's hard to do. Okay, so everything I'm gonna say here is just meant to be a conversation starter. I think a lot of people here on this call don't often utter these myths, but I do think that if you do organize around debt, you might come up against some of these forms of pushback. All I wanted to do was break it down by economic myths, political myths, ethical myths and educational myths around why we can't fight for debt abolition. And so what I'll do is I'll list the myth and then I'll list like a possible way to debunk that myth if you're organizing. So I'm gonna start with economic and I'll just read this out and then I'll give a short possible retort to it. So the myth is often and we hear this over and over again that when in higher education there are budget gaps, we should turn to Wall Street for loans. And that this debt is okay because it allows us to keep our universities running. Someone already, I think Jennifer put this in the chat but other people have talked about this as well that number one, we need to immediately say no, we wouldn't have to rely on Wall Street to fill budget gaps if there were more public funding for public higher education. The other thing that we need to say and really hit home on this is that debt is not income, debt is extracted. It's extracted insofar as the interest in the fees on the loans impact budgets in a purely negative way. That is a form of extracting wealth and resources from our universities. And so every time we take out that private loan and it's at interest, our public goods are being extracted. The other thing to say, and I know Jennifer did mention this is that if we have to take loans, they should be at 0% and they should be from a public bank and or federal entity that we can negotiate with on democratic terms. Because one of the things that we know about the credit or debt or relation between Wall Street and all of the rest of us is that the relation is politically asymmetrical. They have a power over us. And so that has to change. Okay, the political net. And I wanna admit that I think this is gonna rile some people, but again, these are conversation starters. So bear with me for this one. So the myth here is that if we elect Democrats to all the highest positions in our states and at the federal level, then we won't have to worry about institutional debt. And or if we have boards of directors on our side, the institutional debt problem will be eliminated. I wanna be clear about this. That is necessary but insufficient. And clearly we wanna have some friends in high places and I don't think anyone on this call wants to see Republican dominated Congresses, the president, boards of trustees. That's obvious, but we always have to come back to the fact and remind ourselves that most Democrats are neoliberals. And neoliberalism has not been good for education, specifically higher education. I think the case of California is really revelatory here. In 2020, the Democrats won a 31 to nine majority in the Senate. They won a 60 to 19 majority in the House. They control the governorship. That's a state government trifecta. They can veto, it is veto proof. They have a veto proof super majority. And yet what have they done to eliminate the institutional debt crisis? What have they done to drop tuition? What have they done to serve the public rather than Wall Street? We just saw on the slide that Rich and Joanna showed that California is still paying over $900 million in debt service. Something's going on here. And all I'm trying to say here, and this is the key point, is that when we do our power analysis, and I'm really interesting to hear what Kurt would say about this as well, is that our power analysis has to include the relations between the credit rating agencies and the creditors as well. That I think it's really important to focus on some of the things that Kurt brought up, to focus on elections and so forth, to do various lobbying, but we also need to pay attention and at least figure out a way of how are the creditors and the credit rating agencies impacting in a negative way our university governing structure? How are they making decisions for us at the university level? And I bring this up because I wanna make the point that lobbying, I don't think is enough. And if we think that lobbying is gonna be enough to win a lot of the fights that we're fighting, and I don't believe a lot of people on this call believe that, then I think we're gonna run into trouble. Because again, the question would be, how do you lobby but also build in direct actions? How do you engage in political education? And what would it look like to have university debt strikes? What type of leverage might that produce? I think these are some of the questions that if someone says, if we elect Democrats to all the positions of power, then we're gonna be okay. These are some of the possible objections I would raise. The ethical argument. Here the myth is debtors, and you hear this all the time against individual debtors, debtors, including universities, have a choice to take out a loan or not. And once they do this, they have an ethical obligation to pay back every penny of every loan taken. Okay, fine. What would the response to that be? Besides, you're living in a different world. Debtors often take on debt because they have no other means to access basic goods like education. Universities themselves are often forced into debt as state budgets are cut. The myth stated is devoid of context and ignores or obscures power relations. So we need to look at concrete situations when we talk about this. And when we do, we realize that the current system of relying on debt produces victim. It produces adjunctification. It produces firings of staff. It produces student debt. It produces overcrowded classrooms, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. And because it produces that, it's immoral. Any system that produces that level of violence should not be considered good debt, especially when there's all this material proof that shows us otherwise. So again, the way to deconstruct the ethical argument of we have to pay back something because we took the loan is to look at the concrete situation and ask what is that system creating? And in this case, it's creating all sorts of instructional harm, all sorts of different types of violences, and it's extracting from the public good. Finally, the method that is good for education insofar as it allows people to access educational goods. The simple way to respond to that would be, well, this is a case of predatory inclusion. Students, staff, and faculty must work and study under predatory terms in order to get access to something that should be a universal good. And moreover, this type of statement always leads, relies some of the things that Rich and Joanna brought up already about the instructional harm. And so quite simply, when institutional debt impacts how adjuncts can be paid, to what degree, and it's always too low, when it adds to the debt loads that students take on, when it leads to draconian austerity measures that impact the university staff, that all has real harmful effects on education. The question is that we wanna pose for you is if you are going to be talking with people about this and if there is going to be pushback and some people might use some of these, what I'm calling myths, to push back on any type of debt abolition effort, how would you respond? What would be some of your responses? How would you convince someone otherwise that we need to have a widespread movement for that abolition? Because if this was just about having the material conditions, we should have had a debtor revolution already. There's obviously some ideological and ethical work that needs to be done. And hopefully having conversations like this can be a part of that. So that's all I got. Great. Thank you, Jason and Kurt and everybody. We're gonna be going now into breakout groups and take about 20 minutes together to answer or begin to explore the question that Jason has posed and that Max posed, which is like given what's here, how do we begin to have conversations about debt? And I think the thing that's really important to remember about that is if we're gonna build the kind of power that we need in order to take down these systems that it starts with individual conversations. It starts with the conversations that bring people into understanding, to getting them angry enough to be a part of the organizing and to develop a shared vision that we're all working for together. So with that in the chat, I have posted a Google doc, set you up in breakout rooms. There will be a facilitator in each breakout room. Gonna ask you to take about 20 minutes to review the questions that are on that Google doc. If somebody can take notes, that would be really helpful. And please, when you get in the groups, remember to just be attentive to how much space you're taking up, that we listen to each other as well as we speak and that the goal is to begin problem solving around how do we begin these conversations that are gonna be essential to building the power that we need to build. So with that, I'm gonna send you off into breakout groups. Have fun. Matthew, did you not get an assignment?