 which for those of you who don't know, Labor Notes is a publication and education organization project that works with rank and file union members to build more democratic, transparent and militant unions. As part of my work at Labor Notes, I work with higher ed workers, campus workers, and sort of helped to facilitate a group called FEW, Public Higher Education Workers, which meets once a week. Everybody is welcome and we talk about how we can transform our unions to be more democratic and more militant, the complexities of organizing on campus and help each other think and talk about how to do that more effectively. And out of those FEW meetings, some years back, one of the conversations that we kept returning to was the way that campus debt was impacting the ways that what were being told about what was possible on our campuses, the campus debt was driving a narrative about austerity and the cutbacks that were being demanded of workers. And so some number of us began, we talked about that a lot in the Public Higher Education Workers calls, but then some number of us were like, we should actually get together and start focusing specifically on this. There's meat on this bone that we need to understand and we need to understand how it's driving what we're experiencing on our campuses, and we need to do that in order to be able to more effectively organize against it. And so that's how it came to be that there is now the coalition against campus debt. And I'll invite those who are in the coalition to raise your hand and be sure to introduce yourselves on chat as everyone's going to introduce themselves. And so this group, we've just called ourselves the debt group to ourselves, has been meeting and working together to sort of pull apart what's actually happening on our campuses, as I said, with the goal of hoping that we can better organize against it. And in fact, one of the things that we've discovered is that the very act of researching debt on our campuses and doing that with others on campus, with the union, with other campus workers, itself has become an organizing activity. It's a way that we bring people into the conversation is exploring how debt is operating on our campuses. But more than that, we've also organized around debt reveal days, where we invite campuses and some of you here have been a part of that to explore the ways that institutional debt and the financiers who that brings onto campus are deforming the work of public education and pushing a narrative that's defunding it and in fact defunding it materially. So as part of that, we had debt reveal days. The first debt reveal day was in April of 2021, where more than 30 campuses gathered to share what they had done in terms of how debt was driving campus decisions and use that as a way to bring more people into understanding why this is a problem and how we can start to organize against it. Last year here in Massachusetts where I'm based, we had a statewide campus reveal day because we've been able to, with the support of the leadership of the Mass Teachers Association, really build some deep connections and understandings about how debt is a driving force in undermining public higher education. So we're here tonight to talk about the book, Bankers in the Ivory Tower, which is sort of one angle into understanding what's happening on campus. The thing we want to say about that is that as we're talking about that, we always sort of wanting to develop our analysis so that we understand what we're up against. But we want to do that not to just say we understand it, but to say, okay, what does this teach us about how we can organize against it? How can we begin to understand our enemy so that we can more effectively fight our enemy? Okay. So welcome tonight. Delighted y'all are here. I don't know if Rich, if you had a chance to post the link for the Coalition Against Campus debt. I did. I'll post it again in case people don't late. Cool. So with that, it looks like folks have introduced themselves on chat. And I'm going to pass things over to Sophia, who's going to sort of give us an overview of what's in the book. Some of you may have read the book. Some of you may not have read the book. I'm a former high school English teacher. I'm always scared to ask who did the reading. I learned that sometimes it was good to have some people who had done the reading, but we could often find our way to a good conversation if we hadn't. So Sophia is going to give us an overview, and then we're going to just jump into conversations about what Charlie Eaton has to say, how that compares to some of what we've been thinking about, and what we can do about it. So Sophia. Thanks, Barbara, and thanks for everyone who showed up to the night to talk about debt. But so, yes, Rich and I actually worked together to pull out some kind of thought-provoking major threads in the book. So if you had a chance to read it, fresh in memory, if you haven't, maybe it'll be generative for our discussion. So I did put together a few slides that I'm going to share. Give me a second to do that. And I'll go through them, and then it will not take very long. And then we'll really open up for a conversation about the book, but also what do we do with this type of analysis? Do we agree or disagree? And how do we organize to fight campus debt? So one of the things that the book does is that we're, especially those of us in public higher ed, which is probably most of us in this room, we're so very familiar with the story of the decline in state funding to our public higher ed institutions, right? We talk about it or organize around it. And Charlie Aiden adds like additional dimensions to that story and traces like what else is happening at the same time as public higher ed is getting defunded. And so some of the things he points out that Rich and I thought were useful are that, you know, in the 70s and 80s, you also have attacks on unions and working class standards of living that drive demand for higher education. So he even says like higher education becomes kind of a social welfare program. So like so many folks in the US turn to higher education as their only hope to increase their standard of living given, you know, just complete erosion and exacerbation of inequality. And at the same time that that's happening, you have a coalition of business forces and other conservative forces that are bipartisan that are getting rid of financial regulations and undermining public higher education as a public good. And so you you have an increased ability by the wealthy, specifically financiers to avoid taxes and deserve government subsidies for students. And this leads to an increased inequality and shortages in higher ed funding. So it's not just like a decline in state funding, but these other things are happening at the same time. So to talk more about the financialization aspect of the story, he traces the financial deregulation that occurred starting in the 70s and 80s. And the growing power and centrality of financial markets. So as things become more deregulated, these are additional ways that wealthy elites can make money. And the kind of the profit driven imperatives become normalized across all not just corporation, not just the corporate world, but like across the board, including a higher higher education. And part of the argument that he makes is that this happens through the personal social networks of these wealthy elites who like almost all of them go to these very few very elite Ivy League institutions where they're all connected to each other. And they leverage those social ties to like make all kinds of deals and find that all kinds of information that allow them to build wealth. And so the financial logic comes to dominate institutions that are technically nonprofit, like the places that we where we work. Money should always be allocated where it will yield the highest rates of return. And the university leaders, leaders of our universities, no exception in also following that imperative. All right, so what do these financiers do? Just very concretely, like what happens? And what are they doing in our industry, the industry for education? So they're involved in lending to students, student loans, they manage endowment investments, not all of our employers have endowments, but some do. They buy and manage for profit colleges, which matters a lot to us, even if we don't work at those colleges. And I'll say a little bit about why that matters. And they sell bonds to universities. And we've in our work, focused on the other debt crisis, we've really focused on that last part, right? The capital debt that our universities acquire, and the role of these actors in graffiting from that debt. Right, so I said about their social ties. And as the state funding decline, colleges turn towards financial markets for resources. So they borrow money to, you know, just as part of normal campus operations, repairing and building, building a dorm, so on. So these are some of their interventions that drive increased inequality in higher ed, but also in the US as a whole. So there was, in the 1990s, like, there was a drastic expansion of federal student loans. So not especially grants, money, but grants kind of frozen, but expansion of student loans like traumatic. And what I learned from this book, which I didn't realize before, is that that was actually pushed through by bankers, like huge bank corporations. And because they profited from, from these loans in the 90s. Then these hedge fund managers and private equity, I want to say leaders, there's probably a more technical name for them. They turned to their fancy Ivy League schools to actually finance their ventures. So they used these college endowments, and they were connected to these colleges as alums, sometimes often actually for many generations, to, to use, to invest in their private equity and their hedge funds. And when you do that, you're also, it helps with not paying taxes, right? Because these really colleges are nonprofits. And, you know, aside from having a lot of money to invest in what they were doing, they were also avoiding paying taxes and undermining government funding of public higher education and education in general, public education in, in the states that these elite colleges were located in. And they were also buying up for profit colleges. So they were diverting federal student loan money to these for profit colleges, that as most of us know, did not really serve the students, they just put them into debt and don't provide education or the credential that actually helps them with social mobility. So that diverting the government funding through public subsidies for for profit colleges. So the two ways of looking at it is that government subsidies start to flow not to public higher ed, but to colleges that either exclude the less advanced students, so the elite colleges, or that exploit the less advanced students, the for profits. Here's where we put too much stuff on one slide. So to talk through the three tiers. So in this book, he analyzes the effect on three types of colleges. So you have the elite privates, right? Hards and so on, Stanford's, they're, you know, they're hoarding their endowments and their endowments like explode. Huge endowments and they serve, this doesn't cause them to serve more students, right? They continue to serve a very small number of students who are overwhelmingly advantaged. And that's the last bastion of debt-free college that we have in the US because increasingly they don't, if they have students who have financial need, they give them grants instead of loans. But that serves very, very few students. But in the middle, we have public universities. You have the tax and subsidy diversions that go to elites and to for profits. So in the middle, you have, you have to get the money somehow, right? So you increase student borrowing. So student debt is financing it. And you increase capital borrowing, right? The university is borrowing money for buildings and such. And because of this, you know, increased involvement by these financial actors, you have whatever semblance of democracy that might have been in terms of making decisions or the some kind of state oversight of decision making. These institutions really gets eroded. There's less public oversight in what happens. They still unable to meet the demand, right? So at this time, we can talk about what happens in recent years, but when the time he's describing, there's like still a lot of demand for higher public education. And this demand is not met fully by this. He also describes that, you know, these are still public institutions, and it's not that they are privatized explicitly, but the principles by which they come to be run really show that they have become commercialized. So there's a shift in the nature of how they're run. And Rich noted this, this will be of interest to many of us in these fields, but this also comes with the pressure to cut humanities and social sciences and so on. And then you have finally have the for-profit colleges where the private equity investors acquire these colleges in order to capture tuition revenue from expanded loan programs. And for students, this generates crushing debt, you know, few if any economic benefits. And it is preying on already the most disadvantaged college students that we have. So what to do about all this? In his last chapter, even goes through kind of two scenarios for social change. And I think these are thought provoking, but there's probably a lot that we can talk about in terms of whether we agree with these approaches or this analysis and what else might be on the table. So he's focused on what happened in California with a successful passage of millionaire's tax. And more recently, we had the big win in Massachusetts with that as well. But basically he describes a slower, more incremental method of social change where social, like people that are fighting, you know, the situation higher and the debt specifically actually bargaining with bankers and using some of these bankers social ties to like the more elite public institutions, like some of them went to Berkeley. And so they're like proud of being Berkeley grads or whatever. And that helps according to even to, I don't know, appeal to their sense of fairness and morality and get them to tax themselves and tax the wealthy. And then there is then another scenario that he just describes is what he calls the big bang. So where you don't try to work with bankers, but you try to get more immediate results by like resetting the rules of finance through a bottom up organizing, you have just kind of grass roots pressure building from below rather than negotiating with the elites. And the example that he gives for that is the work of the debt collective and the movement to cancel student debt and to have free college for all, which, you know, has had some wins in some sectors of the industry. So we came up with some discussion questions. I'll stop sharing and we'll put them on the chat. And I will turn to Rich and Tracy to start us on our Q&A or our discussion. So what we're hoping to do, you got a very quick look at those questions. We're just trying to use those as a guide to have as much open discussion as possible. We don't have to follow these questions. And, you know, we really think it's imperative for people to be talking to each other and learning from each other, not for us to be talking most of the time. So whether you've read it or not, or bringing in your own personal experiences is what's going to make this, you know, a more fruitful experience. So the first question that we thought would get people talking is, what was the most surprising thing you read or heard about in the book? And how could you use that strategically or tactically in organizing? Oh, there's the question too. Somebody had to be surprised by something. Joanna, you're surprised but muted. You're still, we still can't hear you. You turned off the mute, but we can't hear you. Dan's got his hand up. Okay, Dan, until Joanna gets back. I hope I'm not too long-winded. I think the usefulness of this book to me, I still don't know the full usefulness because it's sort of whenever I read it or think about it, it completely changes my perspective and then changes it back again as to what exactly financiers are. You know, are they vampires? You know, they're just there to extract, extract, extract for their own benefit. And that's it. And it doesn't really matter if it's education or shoes or clothes or food. You know, is that what they are? Or have they been so successful to turn the public into the private and then to commercialized that private good? That they're now who you have to negotiate with and who has power rather than the state? Because when it comes to debt, in the end, like what are the two ways to get rid of that debt? Do you pass laws to do it? Or do you strike and force the banks to concede on some demands? And that's second part is the thing that's kind of blowing up my mind right now because I don't know what that means and I don't know the mechanisms of if you refuse to pay or pay back your debts. Like in some sense, the state comes in and acts like the police officers for the bankers, right? So like the strategy, so I guess the strategy is do you go after government to try to change them into being good cops? Or do you do the power struggle directly with bankers and financiers? That's the big questions that I'm thinking about. Anyone else on that as follow up? Back to Joanna. Now you're officially on mute. You have to unmute yourself. I'm really on mute. Now you're on mute and we can hear you both. So the question, maybe surprising or also just a question that was raised for me in reading the book was this notion of debt-free college and talking about how in the privates it's debt-free because the wealthier tuition-paying students are subsidizing those who can't. And then that's not usually how we think of debt-free college, right? With thinking about it and at least in public colleges as the taxpayers across, you know, a state or through federal taxes are paying for the tuition for those who can't afford it. And the author, you know, kind of talks about the University of California system as being ideal because listen, they're, you know, they're attracted. They have such a great product. They can charge a lot and that allows them to have a debt-free system. So I was a little bit surprised with that kind of framing and I hope I don't think that's what we want to fight for, at least for the middle public state universities. Anyone else follow up or separate thing that surprised you? Sophia? I think it's really important what Joanna pointed out as the idea that, you know, public higher ed is paid for by taxpayer. I thought what was useful in this book is how he shows the way that they leads have taken themselves out of the taxpayer through just like all of these ways of not paying taxes along these loopholes of all kinds of, you know, not just the ones that I mentioned in the PowerPoint, but they are essentially not a public at all. They're not paying at all into it. Let me just add one of my own because as I've gone through this debt project, I've been astounded approximately 11,814 times about what's going on. We discovered covenants and intercept clauses where if a university cannot pay the debtors get to intercept the state appropriation and use it before it can be used for educational purposes. And, you know, the first time I read that, I just said that really can't be true except that it is. And similarly, when we were discovering that again at Salem State, the average debt per student was $3,300 a year just for capital debt. It was like, is this true? Yes, it is. Salem State was actually bragging about it because it showed how they could leverage their students to guarantee the debts would be paid. They had no concept that this would be offensive to students and higher ed workers. And what keeps getting me is the minuscule stuff. Sophia had mentioned, the way it de-democratizes public higher ed, universities have to compete for good credit ratings. And the credit ratings are based on, among other things, who's on your board. The more financiers, the higher the credit rating. The more educators, the lower the credit rating. The more tenure and the stronger the union, the lower the credit rating. But then there was another one that I found in the book about investment disclosure requirements that public universities are required to be transparent. And the private hedge funds demanded that the University of Michigan be exempted from disclosure. Because if the University of Michigan invested publicly, then that hedge funds trade secrets would be out in the open. So they demanded and got Michigan to eliminate the transparency requirement for Michigan's investments. And that's just another one of these invisible, unless you know to look for it, processes in which things are taken out of the public sphere. Kenville? I think Jason was in front of me. I'll let him go first. You can go ahead. Go ahead, Kenville. Thank you. Yeah, I guess I just wanted to quickly follow up on the debt covenant thing. Tracy, who is here, had brought to my attention once that I'm in Colorado and there had been a state law change in the early 2000s that allowed public universities here to, you know, the amount of tuition that you're allowed to pledge to Wall Street increased from 10%. That was kind of the norm in the early 2000s to now 100%. So at my university now, when you look at these bond offering statements in these covenants, they're allowed to pledge 100% of tuition, all of our fees, which is interesting because that's one of our big campaigns. We're trying to get rid of fees. And yeah, that is shocking to me as well and something I didn't know until Tracy gave that presentation. But I guess my question now would be besides that, which is clearly an area of organizing because that's pressure we can put on our legislators. When we're going through these documents, which I think for a lot of us are difficult to look through, like what else in there like that might we want to look for, right? That's it. Thank you. I just wanted to add to that real quick. So CU Boulder, our union, UCW Colorado recently won a victory to get rid of some student graduate student fees and CU Boulder had to then rewrite the covenants of all of their bonds. And so everything had to get rewritten because all of their bond covenants said that student fees were part of that. So it's interesting to think about like this part of our activism or part of our organizing that we thought had nothing at all to do with the bond. Part of it came back and then had this big impact and probably cost the university $15 million or something in bond re-financing fees. Jason? Yeah. So this is all super striking. And I think this addresses some of the points that Dan started to bring up and others highlighted it as well. But I guess my question is like, and this is through studying with you all as well, there seems to be a problem of like governing by debt. And what I mean by that is that it's not the board of trustees necessarily. It's not the president of the university. It's not your department chair, but it's like financial capitalists that are governing your university in a lot of different ways. And I think that's hard to grapple with because I think we spend a lot of our time going after the department chair, going after the president and these other characters when in fact there's like this financial capitalist system run by these people that is like setting the stage for what happens or not, which I think poses an enormously difficult question of like, who do you target them? And I guess what I was surprised about in the book, and I think this is worth talking about further is that he spends a lot of time talking about these individual players who like pull the strings. But I can't help but think that if you removed some of these individual players that are pulling the strings and let's say we had successful campaigns against them, they would just be replaced by some other guys. Which means that in a sense like some of the targeting goes beyond the individual. And so his move at the end of the book, which I thought was the right move and I think Massachusetts just proved this as well, which is to say like you have to like target the debt to economy in so far as you have to flip like where our financing is coming from. And I'm not sure if it's both an issue or an either or where like you either you go after these individuals that he like talks incessantly about, or you just say, you know what, it doesn't matter who the individuals are, let's just go after the system itself and try and reverse where we get our funding from. And so, yeah, I'll leave it at that. But I was a little surprised by the direction that the book took. And so far as like there's this enormous amount of detail about these individual players and how their friends and their mainly dudes from Ivy League schools and all this other stuff, right, that's not surprising. But then at the end of the book, he shifts towards this other thing that they had that Sophie and Rich highlighted, right, which is where you have these like these different campaigns was to me are more structural. So it'd be really interesting to hear what other people have to say about some of this stuff. And I just do serve my chair position in case people don't know what folks are referring to about Massachusetts. Last week, Massachusetts passed the fair share amendment, which increased taxes on individual incomes over a million dollars from nine, from four, I'm sorry, I can do this, from five to nine percent. And specified that that increase in state income, estimated to be 1.2 to 2 billion a year, could only go for public transportation and public education, subject to appropriation. So it was a restructuring of the rules. And that did pass. The Mass Teachers Association was probably the largest force behind that. And part of that has to do with the long term growth of the Progressive Caucus Educators for the Democratic Union in that over the past 10 years. So that's a different type of edu of organizing strategy as well. Other folks? So I'm thinking about Dan's question and your follow up with that Jason. And I haven't read the book, but I was surprised in Sophia's presentation by how personal it sounded like. I could hear that he was sort of talking about these individuals. And I found that interesting. I guess the thinking as an organizer, I think what we do is we target individuals. And then we and then we do political education at the same time. And that I think that's always tricky. That people can come to think it like it's a moral issue. It's just a bad individual. You know, like my answer to your question, Dan, is like, they're vampires. That's the short answer. They're vampires. But there's a whole system of vampires that support each other because the system is built that way. And so how do we, like I think for organizing, we want to target individuals because it makes that more visceral for people and more immediate and understandable. But we have to be really careful that we don't slip into sort of the neoliberal frame that would suggest that it's just bad people. But that in fact, it is a bad system. And that's where I think these analyses can be really important. So that it's not like just the Massachusetts state system is fucked up, but like there's something bigger beyond that. And we have to figure out how to do both of those at the same time. Have a target that's like an immediate target, but be doing political education to the broader target. And I, those are easy words to say, I'm not pretending that's an easy thing to do. But when you do it well at some point, somebody says it's fucking capitalism. And then you're like, yes, they figured it out. Joanna is pointing out in the chat that there are other kinds of for-profit privatization schemes, like outsourcing, student housing, online education. There are many companies that do, for instance, dorm residential living and food services. And these financial agreements are not available in public records. So as much as we can find out through these financial documents and the bond covenants, there's so much more that we can't, we aren't seeing unless we utilize the power for public universities at least to figure out how to do mass open records or requests. Like, is that a part, I guess I'm asking a question like, is that part of how we use this information to do organizing or is where, what direction, that's part of the original question that Rich was trying to ask before. But what's the direction that we're taking with organizing based on the, like, looking at this information? And that's a follow-up question to Rich and the Massachusetts people. I'm just curious, did it matter in Massachusetts if you even knew the names of any of the financial capitalists that were responsible for pulling off some of these debt agreements? Succinctly, no. So then what does that mean? To the extent that there was negotiations, it was more negotiations with those representatives on campus. In other words, there were negotiations to push the presidents of public universities who did not instinctively or logically take the position of being pro-public funding. It took a lot of effort to get even them. But I am not aware, and I was not part of the Mass Teachers Association or the Raise Up Massachusetts Coalition, whether they were actually negotiating and trying to get anybody from the financier side to endorse this. I did not, to my knowledge, see any evidence of it. What I did see the day afterwards was a very, for lack of another word, bizarre article in the Boston Globe about how this easily could have been defeated if only big financiers cared enough to do it. But they couldn't get their asses in gear. And they buried the lead because they said they didn't want to be identified with being that greedy. And they never asked why did they fear that. But to my knowledge, and like I said, I was not in those negotiations, there were not the same types of negotiations that were outlined individualistically with individuals in California. I think if I can just say, I think that's a really interesting question, Jason. In terms of the millionaire's tax in Massachusetts, we did say to people on the doors, there are six people in Massachusetts who have put the money in to destroy this. And we had a number six. And sometimes we would say Bob Kraft, the owner of the New England Patriots, and guess what? He gets the roads. He gets public roads that drive, that people drive to get to his stadium that he makes money from. So like there was some capacity to do that. But the other piece of this, and in terms of Richard's answer, having sat on the Race Up Massachusetts committee back when I was president of the MTA, Race Up Massachusetts was split as to how much they saw this as a negotiating tool and how much we saw it as a big bang. Let's blow up the truth of what's happening here. And those are ongoing debates since the fair share amendment seven years ago was first put out there was, let's bring the business people in. Let's get the business people with us. And then those of us who are like, no, let's blow the whole thing up. Let's show everybody what's actually happening here. And so it's an interesting piece in terms of why the analysis matters when you're going into organizing, because where's the real enemy? Is it just that we want softer capitalism? I'll just say that the victory party that didn't get to be a victory party until the next day, one of the communications people for the Race Up campaign was like, you know, Barbara, I'm going, I'm going to the Boston Globe tomorrow. And I'm going to say, see, business has to sit down with Race Up Massachusetts. That's the name of the coalition. I was like, Steve, you're already a fucking morning. Like, what we have to do is go to the Boston Globe and say, we had three illegal strikes in Massachusetts this year. We're just getting started. Like, but that's the question that, that's the question that you posed, Dan. Like, is it that we're going to sort of negotiate our way to something better? Or is it that we're going to demand something better and then figure out how to go and fight for it? I would posit that many of us for the fair share amendment saw that as, because it was a citizen's petition, was saying, we're not waiting on the legislators, we're doing this ourselves. But within the coalition, there was a battle about that. Emily, I saw your hand there for a second. Emily, was that, oh, okay, cool. Yay. Other folks want to follow up on this one? Or if not, the next question was basically, are there any clarifying questions or comments about the data or argument? Did the argument itself make sense? Or were there also, you know, places in there that you might not have been familiar with all the workings of the financialization and commercialization? And we want to make sure that people have a chance to clarify and not get lost in that type of stuff. Katie? So I had a couple questions. So one thing I didn't understand when you were going over it was about the loans and why those are like increasingly going to for-profit universities over state institutions. Is that because like the for-profit institutions are like the least selective and then the students with the most financial need, that's where they're getting in and going? So that was one question. And I think the second question has somewhat been clarified. But like on the last slide about the millionaires tax, like, so from how Barbara made it sound and how I understood it before, it was like less about negotiating with financiers and like appealing to their morality and more about like, you know, saying that millionaires should have to pay more. But I was wondering if you could speak a little bit more about how it went in California. I wasn't familiar with the 2012 California millionaires. I forgot what it was called, Millionaires Tax or Millionaires Amendment. And was that one more about kind of like appealing to business to do what's good? I can take the first one. So I think what you said about for-profits is part of it. But there's also been just like a massive expansion of for-profit colleges, like just more much more enrollment with like an explosion of them. So they're very lucrative because they're pretty inexpensive to run because you're not actually providing it very much. And you can take student student loans, right? And you make money off of the student loans. And they, their recruitment strategies are targeting non-traditional disadvantaged students. They also target veterans. So they have like a very sophisticated marketing campaigns that end up like tapping into student populations that maybe would not have gone to college, but probably should have gone to public institutions in their state. So this kind of predatory inclusion is a term that you could use. You're including people in higher ed with this predatory practice that leaves them much worse off than they were. I just wanted to add to that that they're, the way that for-profit higher ed tends to work is there's a federal standard where I think only up to 90% of revenues can come from federal loan programs, if that's, I might be paraphrasing that incorrectly, but it's some huge percentage can come from them. And so they can target specifically looking, they're looking for people who will qualify for loans so that they can take loans and then they encourage them in the financial aid process to apply for and accept as many loans as possible, because that they're guaranteed by the government. And yes, lower ed is a fantastic book. Does anybody, I just wanted to add one other thing, which is that what I found, again, one of those many points that was shocking was it wasn't just the hedge funds that were investing in the for-profits, but it was the elite universities themselves. So it's not even a blind eye and there's not always an intermediary. Sometimes it's just that directly mercenary. I don't, is there anybody who has information about the millionaire's tax in California? I only know what I read. Yes, we don't have an answer on that one, Katie, sorry. I mean, I can say what he writes, but I like that is one account and now I read your sentence that kind of encapsulates it and he says, the bargaining strategy succeeded in California because the state's public universities weave an unusually broad and powerful network of intimate ties among civic leaders. So like he's still really emphasizing these social ties among these elite individuals as kind of the main mechanism, which is somewhat unsatisfying in my opinion. So the next question sort of gets back in a different way to Dan's question, the one we've been coming back and forth to, which is what theories of change are embedded in this book? And how can we use that to think about creating change in public IRA? Anyone? I'll go. I mean, this might be just a politics professor in me, but I think the interesting thing is like, whether or not you see the different entities that are in play in every financial transaction, like every point of transaction, right? As a point of political resistance or like an aggromption framing, like a coalition. I forget what he calls coalitions. So you get these coalitions. Is it possible to get a coalition of everybody off the chain of finance and in order to have enough power to tell bankers, we're not going to have the system anymore. So I don't know if it's just bankers. Is it bankers? Is it capitalists of every stripe? You know, that's the other issue is like, if you go after the financed seers, there's all the other people who are interested in capital and the other industries and whether or not they're going to try to, yeah, I'm just having a big Marxist word salad in my brain right now. I think the main point is that there's, I don't know who the allies are in terms of trying to figure out like, who can you get on your side when the argument completely changed their perspective on how economic relations are set up? Like, how can you get that into a position of power that can then help you win more people within a governing space or in society to agree with you? I don't know. But how do you get that, but that's the thing is like, who, I mean, is it like a battlefield where you can just take over space, right? You take over this union or this industry, and then you have more leverage to take over other industries with these ideologies. Or is it, I mean, that's the only kind of conception I have, and that might be completely the wrong way to understand what the battlefield is that we face. Anyone else want to jump in on that? I'm trying not to talk too much, but I'm being unsuccessful. So yeah, what Joanna said is part of it. I, you know, to my comment, like, one of the things I was thinking is that, you know, this whole, Jason, I was just saying, Jason saying like the millionaire's tax opened up a lot of space. I think the space that that opens up as a space for, like, we don't just name how bad things are, we, we contrast the way things are with the ways things might be. And like part of what the win in the millionaire's tax does is it reintroduces the public good in not just in our imaginations, but in like, people are over the next three to five years are going to have more well funded schools. Our roads and bridges are going to get fixed. They're not going to be able to tell us that there's no money when we go looking for, for money for public transportation. And so it, it changes the way people know themselves in the world in terms of what's possible. And that, that will make them more angry about what isn't possible. Like we need to sort of do both of those things at the same time. And I, I don't think it has anything to do with persuading the people who currently have power. It's only about forcing their hand and figuring out where the places we can force their hand. And some of those are going to be small places that we force their hand. But the more we do that, the more of the battlefield will have won until they, they control less and less of it. And I, again, like those are easy words to say, but I don't, and I don't know what Charlie Eaton says. Like what Sophia presented is interesting to me, because he sort of presented like incrementalism or revolution. And I'm not sure that that's exactly what he presented, but or if he's talking about revolution, but it has to be about power. They are all operating on about power. They're not operating based on anything else, but, but capital and power. I think Charlie Eaton is arguing for, I'm not sure it's as, as revolutionary as what you're saying, but he definitely is saying that the finance system and the way that financing a prior education works is just part of that, but that the system of finance and the system of how it undergirds our entire society needs to change. So there's, there is that kind of note. I'm going to add one thing also, because Jason had thrown in about what the debt collective is doing in the process of change. And this isn't necessarily what Charlie is talking about, but it's what we're talking about, which is that it is organizing the bottom up. And it's really slow. And Barbara was talking about contrasting the reality with the possible when the debt collective started saying cancel student debt, it was silly. Yeah, that was naive utopian nowhere to be seen. Only stupid people would talk about that. And it's become both successful in getting several billion dollars canceled, but also it's made it an actual political issue. And then linking it back to the other thing, Biden did a very mild mannered version of this. And that's presently being stopped in the courts. And what that does is get you back to the structure, right? Even if Biden is a nice guy, highly dubious, there's a structure that's going to pull out multiple stops to stop this. And so every victory, even when it's stopped, is a really positive educational building block. And I think as we're doing this, we also have to have a time perspective, you know, similar to the debt collective, they've been at it for 10 years or more, right? They're not at full victory, but they're a hell of a lot closer than they were. And as we look at the financialization, as Barbara said, we're going to win a few small things here and there. And they build and when people keep hitting the same barriers, those barriers become clearer, what they are and they're not the individuals, they're the structure. So I'm going to do two other things. One is before we get to a question of what is the role of organized labor and breaking out of the cycle. I'm just going to ask if there are any students here who would like to say how, you know, you've been affected by this or why you've been interested or drawn into doing this. If nobody wants to speak, that's fine, but if any of the students do want to speak, that would be really good. So the other question was, you know, what's the role of organized labor and unions in doing and breaking out of the cycle of debt? People have been doing stuff on your campus or statewide. I want to talk about that at all. That would be great. Hi. I sort of put stack, sorry. I'm at Wayne State in the School of Medicine. I'm a faculty member there and I'm a member of the AUP AFTM that steward for my department, which is family medicine. We are starting to look at debt in our campus in preparation for our contract negotiation in two years. And one of the reasons why we decided to do that, and we've actually talked to you all before, various members of our union, is we, you know, really settled on our last contract in terms of raises. And we took a lot of concessions, even though there was all this COVID money, like we took no raises in the first year of the contract. And then promptly after we ratified our contract, administration gave themselves a two percent raise. And we were sort of like, wait, where did that money come from? That's interesting because we were told there's no money. So I think we sort of felt like we got, I don't know, like we were underprepared. We were, we end on our research on like, what does the money at our university kind of look like? And you know, what is money going to? And so we were just sort of like, I don't know why, but you know, the teams were said, we believe you that there's no money. And then that kind of put us in a bad bargaining position. And we didn't get what I think we could have gotten. So we're trying to put ourselves in a more financially knowledgeable situation. And that involves, of course, like thinking about debt and where money's going, so that we can say, well, actually, we know that you've taken out, you know, these loans or are using money in these ways. And we're arguing that you need to reallocate that money to faculty and staff, pay raises, you need to reallocate that to reducing tuition. So we're trying to use that in our sort of preparation for bargaining for a contract to, at least when they come to us and say, we can't afford that, that we really know their finances better. So I think in our union, we're, that's how we're thinking about it. Jason's on stack. Yeah, I think one of the arguments that we've been making is that debt is a labor issue. And that therefore needs to be taken up by labor unions. And I'll just give you two examples of that. Going back to Aaron's point, if you look at Moody's and the way that Moody's does their credit ratings, one of the things they'll talk about is that universities that have more stronger unions, they will actually threaten the credit rating or they'll drop their credit rating. And then to give you another concrete example with the Chicago teachers union, when they were in negotiations for their contracts, a lot of the discussion was that if they won the discussion, then there was a threat that they would drop their credit ratings for the city in the district. And so again, this is just to show those are two like structural ways in which like labor and debt are tied together. But just on a more individual level, debt becomes a labor issue. And so far as that the more debt we have, the longer we have to work, it also weakens us a bargaining table, just no negotiations, because if we're desperate for funds to pay our debts, then we're going to accept, you know, weaker contracts, perhaps, just because we have to have something with because if we, you know, to not pay the debts, we're all screwed, right? So there's just a lot of different ways in which debt is a labor issue. And that debt is a gift to capital because it imposes work. And so I think like, there's a lot to say about this question that you posed Rich and Sophia and I really appreciate that question, because I think it's like the creditor debtor relation, social relation is just as important as thinking through some of the, you know, the older relations around the capitalist and the worker type stuff. And I would just add that in the way the campus debt filters through to the students, that that's a really good way to build an alliance between labor and students. And it's both makes sense in that it's an important alliance. And I'll use my favorite quote, which is, we found out that our trustees don't respect students, they just disrespect them less than they disrespect faculty. And they're slightly more prone to listen to them. But when students find out how much they're paying just for capital debt, they're pretty quick to make the linkage to how that affects their education. And, you know, can participate in that. And that's tactically really important too. Because to the extent that higher education workers are saying, you know, we want more funding, we will frequently be cast as greedy money grubbing folks. But to the extent that students are saying we need more money, so that there's a decent education, it changes the framework. Qualitatively, and it strengthens everybody's position. So the labor unions are really critical, but better as part of a coalition than alone, I would argue. And Sophie is on stack. Yeah, I agree with that, Rich, because actually I was thinking about Aaron's question and how like figuring out how to understand the stuff and how to get the data so that you could use it in negotiating. And I mean, I think unfortunately, what sometimes also happens is that like union leadership will use that type of information preemptively to like scale back labor demands, because they're like, look, our institution is in debt. Like we can't ask for that. And it's not their fault. It's, you know, fault of the state. So you should tweet at your legislator and maybe that will change. Like I see that playing out in my own union where they're just and it has everything to do like with what Jason said, like debt is a labor issue because you know, they're they're layoffs and people are not being replaced and the remaining workers are having to carry all the extra work. And the reason for that that's given is the debt of the institution. Right. So how do we do this research and organize around it doesn't feed into this kind of hopeless cycle where we were just kind of retreat and retreat and and yeah. Daniels on stack. I tried to put into a concrete example what I was trying to talk about last time, which was gobbledygook. What I think Sophia points to this is what I'm thinking. That if we want to challenge debt, not only do we have to have our members aligned to do so, we need to figure out how to align with students and that's a huge project in and of itself. But to also successfully do a challenge debt, at least at the university level, we have to convince management to be on our side as well so that we can both challenge the banks directly, as well as try to get the state on our side, because we're a respected institution, right, of higher ed, get the state on our side. So when the bankers try to come down on us, they won't be able to write. And that's a very heavy left. And I mean, this is kind of the beginnings of trying to do that of like, how do you not only take over unions and allow yourself with students, but how do you control the means of production enough to convince management or take over management so that you can challenge this entire debt structure? I mean, because until management agrees that they should not be borrowing any more money and they need it to come from public sources, we're still dead in the water. Management is going to respond when we have more power and make them more scared than the bankers make them scared. But at that point, that's that's that and that's not going about going to management. That's about disrupting everything around management. We have to we have to force them to a choice. Right, but it's better to have management in the state on your side than not on your side. I guess that's what I'm getting at. I I think it I think we're looking and I'm sorry to interrupt about this, but like I'm passionate about this, like, I don't know why we're looking up. I don't know why we're looking up for power. They they're they're not interested in us until we scare them. We don't see any struggle where they're where the elite or those who have access to the elite, the chancellors and the presidents who are just going to be tossed out as fast as anybody but who is who are offered more. Like it we only as Maureen says we only scare them until when we've we've brought enough people on board. But I worry about the idea that we're going to convince them of something. And like I just think it we're we're we're looking the wrong way. We got to we got to look like people were saying we got to look at each other. We got to look at students. Got to look at communities. Got to say what do we actually want for ourselves? We didn't win fair share because we went to the elite to win it. We had to fight tooth and nail to win that. I just think yeah sorry. Clean is on stack. Oh yeah um yeah so I'll just jump in on that and reiterate like I I come from a state where we don't have the benefit of the illusion that we could ever get um you know management on our side to see sense um our management was fairly placed by the governor's chief of staff who led our system for quite some years and only once he had sort of stacked every management office at the highest level did he step away um though he had no um you know actual experience in higher ed and I think more and more whether you see it happen that way or not that is kind of what's happening at the higher ends of of public higher ed. It is very much a sort of um political um entity more than it is an education entity and there there is no room for persuasion so what we have done is um sort of joined together so our unions have joined together with like 50 odd other um unions and community groups and we're going directly to um ideally the streets and and talk we're talking about tax structure we're talking about corporate tax we're talking about those sorts of things and it's going to be a very long haul I mean our governor's not at all um you know susceptible to it but it it is going to be that kind of political fight but it'll have to be you know outside of outside of the walls of any of these institutions including the governmental institutions. Any follow-up on that? Can I just ask what state? Connecticut. Okay thank you you could answer it orally instead of typing if it's easier Kalina. Yeah so our bar thing for the common good effort is um it's called recovery for all and I don't know if you know like normal um from BCG but she's kind of leading the effort here so yeah and I think in in conjunction with that also we're attempting to push legislation that requires more hiring a full time as opposed to adjunct labor so I mean again long long haul but the attempt. I'm going to suggest one thing because I was sort of getting close to our time um it's sort of a linkage back and then we're going to ask Barbara to summarize for us but um as we're talking about the strategies and the larger parts I do want to push for people thinking about actually doing debt reveals looking at your campus seeing how much debt your campus has and how that affects the campus um we've developed a worksheet that for many universities you can do in three to four hours it will tell you how much per student um they're paying students are paying for capital debt it will point that out as a percentage of the campus's budget at Salem State it's 10 percent we found out it was constant it was like two plus and somebody said oh no big deal until we pointed out that that was the size of the entire college of education budget um you can use the worksheet and figure out if there were no debt how many faculty positions could be expanded or maintained how many classes could be expanded and it's fairly simple process to do and reading this book convinced me that what happens out of doing that is in fact that you get a lot of results that are both mobilizing but also very much in line with what Charlie Eaton's much more detailed in depth and academic research gets you get a practical version of the same thing in much less time and it can be very useful for organizing and as somebody said by having people do that research themselves it's empowering and organizing rather than hiring somebody to come in and tell you what the debt is that's passive it doesn't get you going we've gotten um you know students involved because they've done the research on the campuses themselves and they've really been committed to that um I would do one other plug if I might which and I'll turn it over to Barbara is that um you know the group that's doing this the um I keep forgetting our name um the coalition for who are we we keep changing it coalition against campus debt thank you the coalition for campus debt if anybody is interested in starting a campus debt review go to the website and contact any of us we'd be happy to give you links and help on that uh Sophia put in a link to the most recent nation article about it um we are aiming for another debt reveal in April next year we are working with people in New York I'm married um you know in Florida in Indiana and Oregon we'd love to be doing other states we are asking or suggesting you keep your eye open because hopefully by the fall there'll actually be a book that we're working on coming out about how to analyze and organize around debt so um there's a lot that's still going on that's trying to spread this around in the same way that the debt collective started with or similar way that the debt collective started with the student loan debt so unless there's follow-up let me turn it back to Barbara any last thoughts or comments from especially folks who maybe haven't had a chance to say anything questions that you're carrying with you or something you're trying to say go ahead for more yeah um so this just is so extremely depressing to me um to listen to how deep it goes but I really tonight got a little spark of optimism because like hearing Tracy talk about how when they attacked the fees how suddenly then that because this is so complicated and there's so many threads that the capitalist have in this whole thing that as soon as they started pulling the fee thread out things came falling down you know and I'm hoping you know this is just my hope that this is this house of cards and when we start attacking the structure it's just going to come falling down and that's you know I just I got some hope tonight hearing in a way the complexity will be it's will be the problem you know will be the downfall of this whole thing so that's just kind of an overview of what I heard tonight thank you anyone else last last thoughts well uh and I hope you do and check out the webpage uh which can help you get through some of the uh things numerical uh that that makes sense here because the silvered that people are figuring out how to use this who would uh don't feel like they understand finance us uh so any of us can figure it out so I hope you'll all do that um I just want to uh you want to post the website again for the for the devil yeah um like I get more in that it's overwhelming I mean capital is overwhelming the power and violence of capital is just like breathtaking uh and that's like just like one entry point where we we see that and where it becomes it gets close for both of those of us who are in higher ed or those of us who are carrying personal debt uh for another reason because that's that's very debtor society um and I guess I'd say like and like that alone poses like an organizing challenge for us which is where do we find the space that we can sort of maintain and sustain each other uh in the long haul uh and and and find hope in that um um where does you know to the questions that sort of been explicit and implicit tonight like like where does having the what does having the analysis do for us like that's that's the thing as organizers like it's good and and I think as organizers coming out of higher ed in particular who like to have good analyses um like what does it do for us as organizers to have a good analysis and for me I think it leads us to have to really think about power and how power operates and we have to look at history and we look at how how change has been able to happen relative to how workers have been able to amass and use their collective power uh like that's where I go with this and and and and so and then how can our analysis not lead us to despair uh or being overwhelmed but lead us to a sense of what's possible and for me the answer to that is that that I think most of us don't want the world that we currently have and that we that it matters that's part of why it matters like we're talking about higher ed public higher ed that part of our organizing has to be like what would it be like if you know and that's what the union's too much union leadership has filled us that way but that can that's labor's job too labor's job is to say what would it be like if we had free public higher education that was premised on education as a liberatory practice let's get some union leaders elected who start to say that and organize around that's what we're fighting for and all the funding that we need to do that uh so I I think it's hard to tease out but I think it's essential that we think about power it's essential that we think about what do we want not just what do we know or and that will keep us going or keeps me going that in meetings like this keep me going any other last questions thoughts please check out the links if you have not been a part of the public higher education workers network and you want to be a part of it drop me an email at Barbara at labornotes.org and um and keep in touch we good thank you all take care solidari