 Tonight's presentation is a campus workers organizing around that practical ideas and resources, and I'm just going to give a quick. So, first of all, I forgot introductions last time so I'm Tracy burger I am a business analyst in it at the University of Colorado Boulder, and I'm part of United Campus workers Colorado as well. And we'll be talking a little bit later about what our union has done, as far as organizing around debt and austerity. So, this group started about a year ago. And we've been meeting and organizing and getting, figuring out ways to organize around debt and simplify the issue of debt and bring in people to this conversation. And that included the debt reveal day that was April 15 of this year. And these talks and other things that we're working on for the future. We've created resources to expose institutions debt burdens and we're hoping to expand both interest in an organization around these issues. Okay, so just what is university debt. I think you probably have an idea if you're here but in case you don't. University debt is a way of funding public education, public higher education. And also, it's, it's the same thing as municipal debt, which is used by cities and counties and localities and school districts and other public organizations to fund public services by publicly releasing debt so that that people can then not people can fund like mutual funds and hedge funds and larger institutions can then purchase parts of these universities debt and they get paid back over time with interest. And these the institutional debt is based up the terms of the debt are based on a couple of things that are problematic for us. And one of those is the credit rating agencies decide based on, you know, if there's a triple a rating for a university that university gets lower interest rates and better terms, and in order to get that high and there are very few that have a triple a but the, the, in order to get a high credit rating from these credit rating agencies need universities need to basically follow a new liberal. Model, and these agencies go in and meet with, they meet directly with the finance people at the university they have private meetings they get private documents that nobody really sees and we don't, there's a lot, there's a lack of transparency there. And universities are also highly motivated to make decisions around their finances and they trickle down to like what academic programs to keep and which ones to get rid of how hiring practices work things like that can all end up connected to the the credit rage credit rating agencies and then institutional debt is also if you look at the terms of institutional debt. You can see that it's dependent on student tuition and fees and that universities are in general committed to keep their tuition and fees high enough to sustain their debt burden. Which means, again this neoliberal practice of funding higher education through students and parents where it's not not the way that public education was originally intended to function. So the plan for tonight is we're going to hear from campus workers who are organizing against debt and for full funding. And we will then workshop the first steps or next steps depending on where you're at of organizing on your campuses. So the next piece that we're going to do is a breakout. I'll pick up there. Thanks, Tracy. So I'm Barbara Mataloni welcome everybody. I am with Labor Notes, which is an education and publication project that works on supporting rank and file union members to build more democratic, transparent and militant units. And Labor Notes has been supporting the work of the public higher education workers network over the last two years as we bring campus workers together to learn how to reclaim our universities through worker organizing. I'm going to ask you to take a few minutes to get in some breakout groups and talk to each other about the last conversation that you had about that. And when I say that I don't mean like go through and find the last conversation that you had necessarily about university debt. Because debt is widespread taxi drivers in New York City are on hunger strike right now because of the debt that taxi drivers are in. Having bought their medallions students on our campuses are in debt. And students off our campuses are in debt. So this is a real question for you to think about and talk to each other about the last conversation you had about that in whichever form you've experienced that conversation. We want to start to think about how we talk about that. And now we don't talk about that in this country. Get you into breakout rooms. If you don't get an invitation. I will give you one shortly because we got folks hopping in as we speak. So I'm going to give you about five or six minutes to talk about that. Go ahead. Really did you not get an invitation. Great. Welcome back. Sorry to cut off any conversations that we cut off. I'm going to ask some questions and if anything to say, just go ahead and unmute if that gets unruly, raise your zoom hand and we'll do it that way. But curious, if anybody wants to share some of what you heard in terms of what it was like to have a conversation about that. People discussing what did they share and what did they share about what it was like to have that conversation. I can take a turn. I mean, I think it I shared that I work as an adjunct professor at a couple different private universities in San Francisco. And so have been learning a lot and thinking a lot about institutional debt and the role of adjunct labor in in those kinds of business models so I've become I'm in the habit of really of bringing students into the conversation around, you know, their student loan and how their student loan is also tied to institutional debt. And I think every time I talk about it with them, right, it destigmatizes the conversation and is just, I think it's really liberating to talk about. Thank you destigmatizing, because there's something we have to destigmatize about talking about our debt. In particular, but any debt we're going to talk some about the myths. Thanks very much Elizabeth someone else want to talk about what you heard in your conversation or what you said. I shared that that anytime I talk about debt it comes with a healthy dose of negativity that it's bad to have so much credit card dad and you know just it's it's something to be ashamed of. For so many people in in, I'm getting over that at this point. And now I'm getting mad at the people who are capitalizing on, on my debt. But we shared stories of student loan debt. My son has $60,000 in student loans from his masters of library science. And we've taken it on because the jobs that he got after graduating couldn't, you know, couldn't match his payments he couldn't pay for rent and food and student loans so now my husband and I are paying his student loans. Kind of crushing. Yeah, crushing materially and crushing psychically, because we've been, we've been taught to blame ourselves and and be ashamed as you say that in a world of profound injustice. But we've had to take on debt in order to make a life for ourselves. Thank you Catherine. Anyone else. Building on what Kathleen said our group talked a little bit about student debt and how it impacts life choices of students after graduation, and we specifically talked about librarians because I specifically know a few people who train to be librarians and have a really hard time with their student loans. And it's, it's, there's this decision that's being made between, do I want to go to school first of all for the thing that I'm passionate about and then do I want to work in the area that I'm passionate about. Or do I need to make choices based on paying back these student loans and making rent and all of these other obligations. It's amazing how a student debt constricts life choices and really profound way. Anyone else. I guess I'll just quickly report that we agree we should talk about the shame of debt but also just how pervasive it is. And Liz I think you had mentioned new forms of debt. So, you know, new products that are available so you can get in, you know, 2030 40,000 dollars in debt for fertility treatments. And people now are dying in a state of and, you know, their their assets are less than their debts, and that's just normative. So it's amazing right like, it is common. It is something that we actually share that that unless you are incredibly privileged you in order to enter the world and manage you take on debt of one sort or another. And yet, we are ashamed of it. As if it's an individual failing on our part. Rather than that the world is constructed so that we don't have enough in order to, you know, the rich get richer and we take out debt and when we take out debt, who benefits the rich, because they're profiting off their rent seeking so I think it's to sort of name that and a couple of you, Elizabeth and Kathleen both sort of alluded to like coming to understand who you have to be angry at that we've been taught to blame ourselves, hide ourselves. In fact, what we want to do is flip it and say this is about injustice. We should not be in this position. And there should be a public good that is shared and available for all of us. We do not have to take on debt in order to have the life that we need. What we're going to do where we're going to do that is to stop understanding it as an individual issue and understand it as a systemic and structural issue that we have to take on with collective power. And what we're here to talk about tonight is how do we help others reorient themselves to debt. We have a problem of the system that we have to dismantle and how do we then orient also with that reorientation bring people together to take collective action. And in particular, to do that in the context of higher education as a right that for all of us, not just that we should have it, but that it should be fully funded. And in all of its potential. So that's where we're going to go tonight with this. So thanks very much for the conversation and I think I'm going to pass it over to Jason who's going to introduce our next speaker is going to help us hear a story about how this is possible. Thank you Barbara and take everyone. Before I introduce Andrew Ross, I did want to mention a debt struggle that's going on right now that hopefully people are aware of or can become more aware of so in Puerto Rico right now students across the island are striking. There's mass movements against that austerity against the universities there. And so if you get a chance to look into what's happening in Puerto Rico right now I think it's directly related in so far as you have universities that are being gathered across the nation. What's interesting about the situation Puerto Rico is that you have tens of thousands of students coming together to organize against that and a question is like what would it take to do that in the United States here on the mainland. What are the factors that go into that I'm going to share a video about student organizing that was made last year. I think 2019. So, if anyone's interested in more and about what's happening in Puerto Rico this is a good video to see how some of the organizing happened there around debt. On those lines. I'm going to introduce Andrew Ross, who is a long time debt organizer, one of the original members of strike that they came out of occupy Wall Street, and right that later became the debt collective. But just before I do that the reason why we wanted to have Andrew say a few words here was because one of the things that we're up against is a narrative around like the type of demands that we make. I mean demands that university should be debt free that we should cancel Wall Street. A lot of people are going to say, you're fucking crazy that makes no sense there's no way that's going to happen this is ludicrous this is pie in the sky. And what's interesting, and what Andrew a highlight is that when Andrew and other people started to call for debt strikes during occupy Wall Street for a student that they were ridiculed in the same way they weren't taken seriously and so forth and so what we were hoping that Andrew could do for us is to tell us the arc of how like the once, you know, quote unquote ludicrous demand to cancel student debt is now become quite mainstream so without further ado, pass it over to friend and comrade Andrew Ross thanks Andrew for agreeing and say a few words with us. Sure, thank you Jason, can you hear me okay. Yeah. Okay, good. Happy to say a few words here is special about institutional debt because it's such an important topic. And for the most part is not on the radar of most commentators were focused on the fiscal challenges facing higher ed, which is really frustrating. I'd say, you know, most higher ed employees are acutely aware of how public funding cuts have impacted our institutions. But I think the prevailing assumption is that administrators make up the shortfall by either growing their student body or increasing tuition fees. And most employees or colleagues are relatively unaware of how deep in the hole administrators are prepared to go through borrowing. I mean either through bond issues or directly from Wall Street. And in every instance, the net outcome is the same. It's a greater burden on individual student debt and it's a squeezing of employee wages, salaries and benefits. And so while the story about student debt I think has been very well narrated and is now a fixture in the public mind. And I'll get to that in a minute as Jason wanted me to. The same is not yet true of institutional debt nor of its corrosive impact on employee pay packets. But from an organizing perspective, however, I would say that the prospect for the latter are actually brighter and stronger than in the case of student debt. Now, why should that be the case? First of all, because for all of the successes of the student debt movement, organizing in campus itself has been very weak. And this is largely because of the psychology of the student debtor. We found that the psychology works to defer all of the anxiety and resentment and outrage until after graduation. You know, when students actually have to start paying back their debt. So that means that campus organization has been actually weaker or minimal. And this is what we've found over the decades of organizing or so. And so I started out as Jason mentioned as one of the founders of the Occupy Student Debt Campaign almost exactly ten years ago. And also I'm a founding member of the debt collective, which we both belong to Jason and I, and which continues the work. When we launched the Occupy Student Debt Campaign, it was not an entirely new campaign. We were actually drawing on the work of Adolf Reed, who had made tuition-free college one of the planks of the labor party. Which for those of you don't know, the labor party was relatively short-lived. It was founded in 1996 by several progressive unions, active only for a few years. But Adolf made tuition-free college one of the central planks. And so we picked that up and ran with it as one of the demands of our campaign. And yes, we did make demands despite the consensus in Occupy at the time that no demand should be made. We made demands from the very beginning and of course they included tuition-free, they included a debt jubilee. And they were considered pretty outlandish ideas by the public media. And certainly they were far outside of the so-called Overton window, which is the range of policy ideas that's considered acceptable within the political mainstream at any one time. For example, I remember doing an op-ed or pitching an op-ed for the New York Times and the editor told me that this kind of stuff will never happen. So it's not even worthwhile floating it as an opinion piece. This is our classic New York Times gatekeeping, right? Well, we know that these ideas and these demands turned out to be very, very popular. I mean, which parents would not want their kids to go to a quality tuition-free university? I mean, zero. Zero parents. And so over time and through the cumulative work of small successor groups like StrikeDet and the Debt Collective, we've moved these ideas from the very margin of political discourse to the very forefront. And over the last few years, these ideas have become among the leading policy commitments of the Democratic Party. There's a lot of rhetoric which suggests that they can and should be leading policy commitments. Of course, the fact that they've only recently arrived at that level of elevated attention means that they're also on the chopping block in the current wrangling over the Democrats reconciliation bill. But even if they are cut out of that bill, and it's quite possible, they will be, they're not going to go away. They're not going to go back to the margin. So the story of the student debt movement I think is a very good case study in how quickly a very left field idea can be converted into an established policy standpoint. And it can be done through strategic organizing of a relatively small number of people. So the question is, then can institutional debt follow the same path? Why not? I've always argued that student debt and the debtor's union created by the Debt Collective, because that's what we are, is a natural extension of the labor movement. Because debts are the wages of the future. They're promised for in advance of the labor that earns those wages. But that's kind of indirect and sort of abstract for some people. Institutional debt, however, seems to me to be much more directly in labor's wheelhouse. And if the higher ed unions can get behind it, it should go faster and it should go further. And because we're talking about the financial health of large institutions, which collectively impact hundreds and thousands of employees, it makes it much more difficult to channel the issue into a matter of individual morality. And this is what often and sometimes always happens with the skewed discussions of students that they revolve around the moral responsibility of individuals for their financial decisions. That is not the terrain on which the institutional debt movement will founder. And we'll probably want to have to deal with that, because it's not so much of an issue. But it has to be clear that there is a direct correlation between institutional educational debt and personal education debt. How could there not be? And yet that relationship is obscured in the public mind and it should be said also in the minds of many members of the academic workforce. There's a lot of work to be done in consciousness raising on that front. Finally, and this does not go without saying, unlike with students that the unions are already there. The warm bodies are already in the room of dialogue. Maybe the dialogue hasn't started yet, but the warm bodies are in the room. So that hard work of building unions, which we've tried to do with the debt collective, doesn't need to be done. From an organizing perspective, that means that more than half the battle, maybe 60% of the battle is already won. But of course, as we know, the other 40% will still be a heavy lift. It will require innovative strategy and tactics. And I for one, I'm looking forward to being part of it. So thank you for inviting me and look forward to this conversation. Thank you so much, Andrew. It's always great to hear from you and it's always educational on so many levels and thank you for everything you've done with, you know, so many years. It's really an honor. So I want to now introduce some folks who maybe to build on what Andrew was saying, which I think is really optimistic and on a lot of levels like we're up against some big giants right but there's, you know, I think Andrew gives us a nice lens to view this battle through. So I want to introduce some folks that are have already started to do that organizing against institutional debt in some really creative and I think powerful ways. So I want to introduce Zoe from CUNY rich and Jonah from the Massachusetts system and Tracy from Colorado, and they're going to talk about some of the stuff that they've been doing in their other campuses and around their campuses around this question institutional debt, because it's through these examples of what some of our colleagues and comrades are doing that we can learn how to build power across a variety of different locales and adopt a variety of tactics to take up the struggle that Andrew was talking about. So I'm going to turn it over to you. It's really good to see you again. We met Zoe in a park doing a really good speech on institutional debt in front of Chuck Schumer's building so really good to see you again and from Zoe will go to Joanna and rich and then we'll go to Tracy so thank you so much. Thanks so much Jason, and I'll just mention that my colleague from CUNY Leanne is also here so if I miss anything in this account she might jump in and fill in some gaps. But yeah basically I'm from CUNY I'm a grad student. I'm both studying and teaching on campus and for those who don't know the Union at CUNY the PSC is a wall to wall union we have 30,000 members. So, lots of bargaining power but also you know a lot of people to try to organize and mobilize. And I should say that the union is made up of tenured faculty of graduate students of librarians of administrators so there are a lot of different interest groups. And what is so great about the question of institutional debt is that everyone has a stake in it. You know, previously with with issues around student debt, which, obviously, as, as Andrew Ross and others have mentioned, while it is mutually implicated with institutional debt, if we're really trying to get people who are a little less enthusiastic about intersection or people who maybe occupy less precarious positions in the university, bringing up institutional debt gets them a little more riled up. So basically we went about it just by creating a committee in our union. This was really still, you know, pen, like the, the varied dire time of the pandemic. Of course, that's, it's still dire. So all of our meetings were on zoom they were conducted online, which presented a bit of a challenge. And I'd be curious to, you know, hear about people's experiences organizing now as campuses are kind of returning more in person courses and modalities, but we did everything online. I will also say that it's not as challenging as it looks I went in very intimidated as someone who is unfamiliar with the math and the bureaucracy and that kind of investigative research. But we were really helped by the debt collective, which organized workshops throughout the semester so we were able to go to the workshops ask questions of people. We were also helped by the fact that because CUNY is public all of its budget documents are available. Frankly, like many of the numbers we were looking for you think they've tried to hide it a little more in a more sophisticated manner but they, a lot of them were just right there stayed on the budget. So it actually it obviously took some digging. But I really think that anyone can do it any group of people provided that you have the enthusiasm and the sort of organizational structure anyone can do it. So we kind of ended with during that reveal day we had a big presentation that was online, and then I actually participated in a walking tour of Hunter College which is a CUNY campus, and that was actually really great because that involved student organizations. And that was one of the big goals we had was just not not only to kind of spread this information and diffuse it through faculty and workers but also get students interested and engaged and one of the things that really helped with that is we were able to show them some interesting statistics that were like, you know this percentage of your tuition actually goes to servicing CUNY's debt, or if we didn't have CUNY's debt, we would have, I think the number was, we would be able to hire 2000 full time faculty members. And those numbers are really astonishing and they are, those are sort of the figures that get students excited. I don't want to go on too long but all that is just to say I'm also like available to answer any questions. Leanne also knows just as much as I do, and might have something to say as well Leanne I don't know how you're feeling. Thanks so much Zoe. Yeah I just wanted to say that I hope they are really grateful to the state collective for giving us the opportunity to learn from them and organize with them. And this exercise is really also an opportunity for us to think about these numbers as telling a story and flipping the script. Helping us get a hold of what our institutional priorities actually are, and from researching the debt, it actually helped us think a lot more about how austerity predated COVID, and think about campus security budgets. And eventually we actually, part of our debt, leading up to our debt, in field day we actually had a list of 10 budget facts that we were able to put together so yeah, thank you all. Thank you so much Zoe and Leanne. I want to allow if people have maybe one question after each of these great examples I mean there's so much to talk about. What you're hearing from Zoe and Leanne so maybe if we can have at least one question that someone might want to ask either like clarifying question or just a more general question. That's a long moment for that so does anyone have a question they would they would like to ask Zoe and Leanne about their organizing around institutional debt at CUNY, and either just raise your hand or speak up or put your name in stack so Aaron, go ahead. Thanks. I was just curious if you could say more about the walking tour and how you mobilize the student body to support I think I'm at Wayne State I think we'd be interested in doing similar stuff but some more detail be helpful thanks. Yeah, so I should say that actually our committee didn't organize that walking tour. It was organized by a group called free CUNY, which mobilizes around these kinds of issues. And has been really vocal especially about trying to reduce campus security and their presence at CUNY. And what's so great about free CUNY is it has both students and faculty members as part of the group. I think there were faculty members on our committee who were already working with free CUNY and there was just kind of a natural overlap there. And they got to hearing about what we were doing and we were hearing about what they were doing and they came up with this idea of a walking tour. And I guess sort of the kind of concrete advice I could give is if there are any kind of interest groups that involve both students and workers. Those are really good places to start. Really quickly, Andrew Lusk and then Andrew Ross two questions and two quick responses and then we'll do the same thing for the next, the next round too. So Andrew Lusk if you could introduce yourself to by saying your name and where you're coming from either. You know doesn't have to be an institution just where you are in the world that'd be great. You're up Andrew Lusk. Yeah, I think so. He'll be back. Okay, Andrew Ross go for it. Oh yeah just very quickly. I'm just wondering how transparent you found the data on your institutional and institutional debt and this could really go for any of the speakers. Obviously, it at a public university, a lot of the data is more available but there's always stuff that's hidden, right. And I'm curious to know if you, if you came across that the same pattern. Yeah, the audits were all readily available and the budgets were also, but actually an area that we're looking into in the future is looking at CARES Act money. And for that's going and that, even though they're required for that quarterly, the buckets that they are reporting on you know this is that you know scales of like 10s of millions of dollars is very vague and very suspicious so certainly an area of future research and organizing. Thank you, Andrew Lusk you're back with us. Tell us where you're coming from thank you. Sorry, I have a terrible internet connection but I switched to hotspot so can everyone hear me am I still coming through okay good. Hi, I'm Andy and I was recently involved in the NYU grad worker strike. I helped out with that, but unfortunately I had already graduated at that time. And I'm here today to learn a little bit about how to get involved with organizing even if I'm not, you know, technically affiliated with an organization anymore or how to like reconnect with people at NYU or other universities or kind of expand into that world. Andy I think I think at some point we can put up some possibilities in the chat of different groups that you can look into. And then if you want to follow up with us we can we can talk about that and be an email at any time. Awesome. Thank you so much. Thank you. Thank you for joining us and for having back on hotspot and all. So, thank you so thank you Leanne, and I want to turn it over now to rich and drama to talk a little bit about some of their work in Massachusetts. Thanks Jason. My name is Joanna Gonzalez. From Salem State University and with my colleague rich leavey going to split our time and just sort of tell the story of our organizing journey that we've been on around our university debt. And my portion will really just talk about what's our entry point into these discussions and into this business of organizing around debt, and it began actually two years ago. We were starting to feel really the palpable impacts of Massachusetts decades of austerity. Our tuition and fees was, you know, getting really high students were working too much there was a bit to a lack of resources and just always inadequate left you know levels of funding. And so, at the time we just thought we need more money from the commonwealth to fix our problems. We borrowed an idea actually from one of our sister campuses, and it's a it's a neat idea to start conversations which was we held it, our union organized it it was a teaching. It was called you know the financial crisis and on Massachusetts public campuses, and our attention was really focused on, you know, rising tuition student debt burdens. And the students really enjoyed being able to talk about their debt, the impacts of debt about how this was all getting in the way of their education and was going to have lifelong impacts. The teach on really took off, and we ended up having 125 classes that participated. We had faculty and staff doing the teaching. And reached over 1000 students. So that was a really great way to start organizing. And at the end of the teach and we did sort of direct messages down to the commonwealth, you know asking for more money. So it got us paying attention, not only to campus finances, but we started showing up to what a trustees meetings because they were the decision makers right, and we want to know how they were addressing some of these problems. The following year we decided to continue with the campaign but this time we called it we belong here, and we centered our work more around really inequities around issues of inclusion. How there's a desperate impact of, you know, student debt and access to debt on historically marginalized student groups, but within a few months of that campaign kicking off COVID struck. We actually were able to channel the energy to push back. You know, just just like probably another campuses, all of a sudden we were facing with real immediate mega cuts coming down, you know from the board of trustees, we're talking about retrenchment of up to 10% of our faculty, six weeks of furloughs for all employees we had a 25% in our part time staff. And the reasons the board of trustees said that these mitigation measures were necessary was because of the projected low occupancy in the dorms from COVID. So that, you know, for at this point we had like over 100, you know, faculty staff and students watching these, we couldn't understand how all of our campus finances are tied to the profitability of our auxiliary services. That's pretty messed up. So we, we formed the Union for formed a small capital assets group. We also had a couple of students join in and like Zoe's campus we just started, you know, taking a look at the books that were publicly available. And, you know, the information about capital debt wasn't hidden. We took a look at the, you know, annual debt service that our campus was paying on our quarter million dollars worth of campus debt. And what we learned is that, you know, in the span of 10 years, students were paying on average about $500 of their tuition fees towards the capital service fees. Up to at that, at that time, it was about $3,000 of their fees were paying the campuses capital debt. So essentially, it was in a high moment where we realize that the, the loans that our university was taking out for campus buildings and renovations were being paid for by the students. And in the injustice of that. So we started our journey here at a local level. And while the organizing honestly, you know, during the pandemic, it felt good to be doing something than doing nothing. Our impact was pretty insignificant. The only way that we could really address what our board of trustees called our structural deficit was to take on, you know, take to scale up the effort, right, we needed it, we couldn't do this alone. And so, Rich, we'll talk a little bit about the scaling. Thanks Joanna. The only other aspect of what happened, you know, on the campus stuff. Just because of history of few and all of that was to say what we did was basically not under the leadership of the union shall we say we did this independently. We were in the union or parallel to the union or wild caddy, and we weren't always welcomed by the leadership initially it was okay subsequently it was less so. But what was really critical as Joanna was saying, is because we were linked up to out of state networks like few were able to link up with folks who helped us get a wider perspective on debt. We also provided the mutual support, both in knowledge and in perspective, but also we are meeting once a week with this group, and it was just really energizing. And if one person was down the other four people were being supportive, and I don't want to ignore that human element of having a support group as really critical. So we came up then with Joanna and I in it started organizing for the April 15 that revealed a, you know, we all came up with a easy to use worksheet for analyzing debt on campus, of step by step. We came up with what Zoe talked about the notion of instructional harm, how many services are lost because of debt payments. So we started to increasingly integrate into our discussions the invisible factors, the, not only the role that rating agencies play, but how they play it. What are the criteria, the stronger your union, the lower your credit rating, just to be overt about that. And hearing seeing that in print is pretty incredible. We also got out of this group. The fact, the clarification that debt is a power relationship, it's financial relationship, but more critically it's a power relationship. And so we're constantly in this, not just understand that but to create power on campuses, and across the country, first to clarify the issue and then to try and transform it. In Massachusetts, we're trying now to move on to a statewide project of revealing campus debt on all the campuses, and it's pretty hard. Given all the stresses that people are under from COVID and austerity and everything else. It's hard to find people are interested and have time to organize for what's still an obscure issue for a lot of people. We're relying on the combination of people who've drawn been drawn into this issue. And a lot of them are sporadic they'll come and do stuff for two months, and then not be able to do stuff, but keeping up the contact they keep coming back. With our work today, the support of the cross state networks like few, our little group, you know the other college debt which is running this has been growing. We're continuing throughout Massachusetts with one on one conversations, building up what we've accomplished. We're trying to reach out on campuses, really critical is building alliances with students, setting up email lists we have an informal email list of 170 faculty members. We can set it up but we can communicate with two thirds of the faculty through that we set up group means for instant messaging during board meetings and people are otherwise isolated and just screaming at their screens. We've been publishing op ed in local media, and we've been building the debt into other struggles so when we write an op ed about furloughs, we link it back to debt. When we write an op ed about x we link it back to debt. We've been publishing articles in the Union statewide publications. We've been going to national workshops of activists and unions, largely through a Laney skills we've got stuff in the nation we've got stuff in labor notes. We even got something in the UPS Journal of academic freedom for those who like the academic type of stuff. But in all of this there have been a few underlying principles. We're not understanding debt in order to publish snazzy articles and to build up our own prestige, but to build power. Right and as somebody else as Joanna said other folks said that means not being specialist caught up in the details, but knowing enough to be dangerous. And that means talking to people one by one time and time again, starting where they are not where we are. You know, start with questions, developing networks on our campus and beyond. And from those we learn new strategies insights methods of outreach, and we also get the support to keep ourselves going. Always focusing on building power. That's what it's really about. And that takes time. And one of the things that sustains us is looking back to see how far we've come. A few years ago we started with the teach and recently a couple of months ago our local president was not generally aligned with us confronted the administration's narrative about a structural deficit by saying the key element of the deficit was not faculty salaries, not waste, but campus debt. And that became part of the conversation, and they can't take it back. Right. And I think the vice president of the mass teachers association, who is on his way here we think told us that this debt stuff now pervades a lot of their outreach to legislators. When they're talking to legislators about funding they say, every time you put more money into building university construction, that's less student debt. And that's a connection that they wouldn't have made before. So I think that these victories, small and medium, and they really help us in these groups to keep going so I'm going to stop. Thanks so much. Thank you rich and John. Do any of you have questions for rich and John. Elizabeth, go for it. And if this is like too far sideways, like please. I don't I don't mean to derail things but I'm often curious about the role of accreditation in like sort of maintaining the perception of the value of a degree and that's particularly true because I work at like very expensive like private colleges. And I'm wondering if there is like an angle or an approach in the way like what the criteria are that accreditation institutions, because I see them as being very complicit in the current situation. But I don't know if there's like an opening there or not. We, we did try, we did try that on our campus. Salem State got the accreditation came just last spring. And so we very much tried to talk about how our finances were just in total disarray and needed to be addressed and needs to be addressed from our Commonwealth and talk about the ways in which we can't take on any more capital debt like that means no new buildings, no new buildings and we wrote directly to, you know, the chair of the team we spoke with them at the meetings. And you know when their report, they applauded our board of trustees and our CFO for managing the pandemic so well, completely deaf to our conversations. They are not an ally they're worried that they want to make sure that our students can pay back their debt that they take on because the federal loans, right, are provided by our government the rates are way too high, and they want to make sure those loans get paid back. Right. Are there any other quick questions for rich and john. Thank you so much rich and john so just again like these are different ways that people are already organizing on different in different parts of the country and now we want to hear really quickly from some of the initial efforts that are being undertaken in Colorado by Tracy and her comrades so Tracy, a few words on that please. Sure, so I'll go really quick. I rich and Joanna and the work at same state have been a real inspiration to us at the University of Colorado and a lady's work and the articles that she has published were honestly what drew us into this conversation about institutional debt. So, this is a group of people that I'm really happy to be working with. And we kind of started from a perspective of having done an anti austerity training as a union and have having a group of people who wanted to research our budget and our finances and kind of see where as the university was making these announcements about the budget and the budget cuts that were coming as a result of COVID. What was really happening in the budget and the finances and it turned out to be really important for us to look at debt, among other things. So we started doing research on the finances and looking at like the, the annual financial reports from the University of Colorado which are available easily online there these hundred plus page documents that have an incredible wealth of information if you start looking at them and getting people interested in this top in these topics because it's really a very wide range of things that you can research once you start looking at austerity policy policies and budget and debt was kind of our first phase of activism and getting people involved. And then we signed people to, you know, research. Hey, can you find out the statistic for the University of Colorado or for the specific campus. And then we published the questionable decisions report which I will put a link to in the chat. And that is was the result of the first few months of research and from the beginning we were aware. Hey, this is going to take more than a couple of months. So we are currently working on our second round of this report which is coming to the third bullet point, don't stop. We definitely had a lot of a bit of a slowdown over the summer with people off campus people going and doing research, our large proportion of people in our Union who are grad workers, transitioning out new people transitioning in and people with new interests coming in and we're shifting our focus a little bit to taking it back to the basics and confronting the myths that we talked about in our last session, and specifically the idea that this is just how the system works. And this is how public funding works so we're going back to looking at public funding for universities nationwide and in Colorado, and trying to do some political education around. Hey, this is not how this used to be. This is not how this needs to be this needs to be different. And kind of going back to that and then also going deeper into looking both at debt and what's being funded by debt, and what's being funded through our investments as a university. So yeah, I'll just leave it there and then. Thank you. Thanks. Thank you Tracy. Does anyone have any questions for Tracy in the Colorado system. Okay, so we wanted to give you some like practical material stuff that can get you started, and we have crafted a cheat sheet of like how to start around debt organizing on your campus or in your state. And I'm that cheat sheet is not only some organizing tips but also some ways to talk about some of these common detonates that keep people from organizing. And so to go over that I'm going to turn it over to our friend, Lainey, and she's going to lead you through some of the key points to this worksheet that we hope you share very very widely on as many different platforms and with as many different people as you can. So, Lainey it's all you. Hey everybody. This is super inspiring and exciting and basically I have the boring part of taking all of the really cool awesome stories that everybody just presented that was like born of flesh blood and sweat and we put it on a PDF for you all. Whatever we do what we can. I'm going to share my screen quickly, or maybe I don't need to you basically will go through this quick. Tracy and I both dropped in the chat. A PDF that you can look at that basically captures what we think are some of the key points of this work that we're doing and really, really truly with an eye towards the most important question which is how to get started, because so much of this issue is incomprehensible. I am going to hazard a guess that none of us here would describe ourselves as financial experts of any degree. And in fact, I take the position that that is exactly our credential to be working in this space, because it is too often relegated to the work of sort of wonks and technocrats who are telling us what needs to happen for our students and our colleagues. So, just really quickly the document basically works in in two parts let's say the first part is about basically steps to get started. I just said, you know that just, there's, there's, you know, some texts in here, I think we're all in agreement that this is probably a draft and we're going to look forward to updating this down the road as we all continue to deepen and broaden this work. But some of the first things, you know, come with organizing as a team to not try to do this alone. And if you have one other one other buddy doing this with you all boom you've got your team and to approach the research itself as part of the organizing so that those two points are really connected to each other. Asking these kinds of questions is is when done in an open transparent way is actually can be part of the organizing tasks. Then I guess that there's some ideas of once you've begun organizing and figuring out some of the details of some of the basic facts of how much debt your university owns. How does I think one of the things you know there's there's more to talk about on the technicalities of this but the workshop that was shared in the chat that that rich created is really really helpful and one of the things that that worksheet helps does is it draws into light the proportions that debt is used, compared to other things on campus and I think that for me that was really eye opening because I have a hard time kind of comprehending what's $300 million of a university budget. But when I understand that that's, you know, more than student services or less than the police department it helps me kind of gauge proportionately what this means for a university budget so that's a little a top trick. So I have some ideas on here about teaching series and how to start building public facing conversations about what you're finding. And to think about what are some of the long and short term demands around debt. So, so, you know, we're, we're unlikely to abolish debt in any of our single campaigns, probably this year probably next year. We can start to make demands about how to make the if, if our universities do have to borrow money, how to make the how to borrow money in ways that minimize the instructional harm. And that can, can not have our workplaces and our sites of learning be also places of extraction for corporate profit. So we have some ideas about that. The second part of the document is draws from the session that we did last month about myths around debt. So one of the challenges that we found and this is sort of a gesture to how we opened our time together tonight is that there's so often we have ingrained in our head that debt is sort of naturalized in a certain way, and that it kind of usually happens around a set of have tos I have to pay this. I'm, you know, oftentimes with some kind of moral things and so one of the challenges was we organize around debt is to break down these myths so in this document we've kind of jotted down what we think are some of the top myths top you know, top myths that keep our society locked in debt, and we've got the economic some of the economic arguments, we sort of we list what these arguments are, why we think these are actually myths, and not truths, and how you can work on reframing them so we're encourage you all it's a little pedantic and too late to walk through this step by step but trust you all will have thoughts on this and that we can incorporate revisions and updates on this is why and I felt my colleagues agree with me I think they do we'll see this as a living document so what we want to do in our final minute any questions on this stop screen sharing so I can see everybody more easily. Any questions on this document right off the bat or thoughts. I think we have a few final minutes to jump into breakout sessions to basically work through this you know really what this whole session is about and what you know folks have shared with us and what this document is trying to put in paper form is how do we get started doing this work. And what are the kinds of how do we start drawing people together what are the first steps we can take what are the resources that can sustain us. We're going to go into breakout groups for a couple of minutes and just to begin to think about this of like what is it that you see where are some of the places that you think you can get started if you've been doing this work already. What are the next steps to on the journey, what are the next conversations you want to have and how how can you, who can you draw together to have those conversations. What are some of you know you're also. If you're just reading this document for the first time I want to talk about a particular myth for example that you find really limiting on your campus like how do you want to tackle that particular myth or act some anyways. That's that's that's what we're going to be doing and breakouts now. I'll go ahead and open the rooms and let's take at least 10, maybe 12 minutes. And actually I'm going to some people have had to jump off so I'm just going to move a few of you around here so that we have. All right, see you in a little bit.