Entrepreneurialization, although still quite new, is rapidly becoming national policy through the US. Hardly complete or entirely successful, restructuring faces numerous forms of overt and implicit forms of resistance. Nonetheless, this resistance is limited by a failure to directly challenge the university as a multinational corporation in an international context. Student and faculty activists have demonstrated an inability to conceive of the university as a factory in which people are expected to work and prepare themselves to work but don’t. Few conceive of the university as a terrain of conflict beyond the contestations created by formal protest movements. For some, this failure holds dire consequences for continuing efforts to radically reorient the universities to serve the needs and desires of people rather than control and exploitation.
In conclusion, I examine efforts to move beyond resistance by creating new and expanding existing spaces within the universities. My purpose is not so much to offer detailed documentation but to raise questions as to the possible relationship of such resistance to the continuing crisis of higher education in the US. There are many questions to be asked in future research into entrepreneurialization. How do these spaces relate to formal student movements? Do such forms spaces have implications beyond the conceptions of those engaged in them? Do these implications have a place in an analysis of the continuing crisis of higher education, the crisis of capitalism, and the current strategy of entrepreneurialization?
However, these spaces cannot exist independent of the universities even as they transform them from within. Eventually, much like the ethnic studies and multiculturalism movements, they will undergo conflicting pressures of institutionalization, commercialization and demands that they serve the diverse needs of student, faculty and local communities. Without an analysis of the universities in the context of international capitalist society, such efforts may not withstand the weight of institutionalization and pressures of entrepreneurialization. A “wages for students” perspective may offer a starting point for developing an analysis from which we can both resist entrepreneurialization while defending and expanding such spaces. Such an analysis begins by articulating the conflict between school being unwaged work that served current and future employers – the very foundation of entrepreneurialization – and the pursuit of our own autonomous projects.
While there are many more aspects of students and the university that require critical attention such as the relationship between “everyday forms of resistance” and existing student movements, the international dimensions of entrepreneurialization, and the international circulation of struggle against NAFTA, GATT, and university development projects, I have decided to focus on entrepreneurialization of US universities in order to offer a case study that can help launch further efforts. I conclude with a look at the existence of spaces within the entrepreneurial universities that can tell us something about how people are already attempting to reorganize the universities to serve needs other than those driven by profit and control. Knowledge of such spaces offers a foundation for organizing broader movements beyond simply responding to austerity, entrepreneurialization, and repression to transforming or transcending the university as we attempt to transform all of society to serve our own diverse needs.
Moving Beyond Resistance: The Greening of the University
Alongside the multiculturalism movement lies a growing effort to refocus many facets of the universities on documenting, studying and attempting to resolve aspects of the “environmental crisis” of our planet while transforming the way we live in ecologically sound ways. Although many know of student recycling and anti-CFCs campaigns that have been adopted by many universities administrations as a result of legislative mandates, little is known of a wide range of efforts being directed at investigating the environmental impact of university operations and research and development projects, identifying threatened species or sensitive marshes and recharge zones, the development of alternative renewable energy sources and even the documentation of the music and customs of endangered human societies. While most of these efforts exist outside formal academic programs and departments and are carried out by individual faculty and students, they span the academic spectrum from the biological sciences, geography, liberal arts, music, and even mechanical engineering which is better known for its military research. However, some universities and colleges are beginning to embrace such research activities by creating environmental studies departments and even student centers far transcending the mere collection of office paper and soda cans.
Much of the emerging concern for environmental issues in the universities is rooted in low-profile student cooperative housing movement that emphasizes an ecological transformation of living space, diet, consumption, self-education and even decision-making. Since the late 1960s, cooperative housing, as well as cooperative grocery stores, has offered a base for not only the current widespread environmental action in society as a whole but even throughout the universities. Lee Altenberg suggests that such “ecological living groups” have played a powerful role in the reorganization of the universities and for establishing an autonomous foundation for the student movement. “Students form a group that takes control of their living situation – including running their own meal plan and housekeeping – so they can express their ecological interests not just as an extra-curricular activity, but as the very fabric of their college life.” These houses become laboratories for the direct utilization of appropriate technology such as solar energy, vegetarianism, composting, recycling and consensus living arrangements. “By giving environmental activism a literal home on campus, a culture of ecological skills and experience can be transmitted from one year to the next and can keep evolving. Campus activism can change from a pattern of disconnected projects that are accomplished and soon forgotten, to one of continuous history where students can leave a legacy that future students will benefit from.”[1]
Such ecological living groups have long been positive complements to a vast assortment of student movements, including those resisting the university’s role in environmental destruction. Ecological living groups provide experiments with new forms of social relationships that may give us a glimpse into some of the many possible ways we may live in the future. Unlike a commune, these living groups are tightly wound up in the everyday activities of the universities while it both subverts its function as a corporation and transcends beyond it. There are numerous examples of ecological living groups that exist between the interstices of even the most entrepreneurial universities. Synergy House was established in 1972 at Stanford, home for more than 500 students throughout its lifetime. Qumbya Co-op was formed by 15 students at the University of Chicago in 1987. There are also houses at UC-Berkeley and the University of Michigan where the North American Students of Cooperation, which assists students in establishing co-ops with financial and other resources is based. In Austin, during the 1970s-80s, the Ark served as a center of radical political organizing. House of Commons (HOC) is still known as a social space for those trying to establish new ways of living, although financial hardship has eliminated the Inter Cooperative Council’s (ICC) policy that house members have a consensus vote on new members, thus providing HOC with a diverse collection of members which sometimes results in conflicts over basic intentions for living there. Ironically, ICC officially insists upon a policy of being “non-political” ignoring the inherent political nature of co-ops.
Since many of the residents are students, these cooperative living experiments have gradually begun to have an influence on academia itself. Some students have attempted to use the structure of the university in order to create unstructured degree programs, student-run courses, and environmental studies centers and degree programs. These efforts demonstrate a tactical move from simply resisting to efforts to reorganize the university, creating numerous future ways of learning and living in the present.
At a growing number of universities students are organizing their own courses dealing with the environment. Altenberg, who has been working on the creation of student run courses at Duke, explains that “the most potent instruments students have devised to empower their activism is the student-run course. Students can create their own full-credit courses in which they can do research on the urgent political and social problems of the day, as part of real world campaigns to address them.”[2] This idea is hardly new, since it is motivated by the movements of Black, female, Chicana/os and Asian-American students in the 1960-70s to create their own studies programs and “free universities” outside or overlapping the campuses. In fact, as “ethnic studies” faced cutbacks and the free universities disappeared, many students began to look to spreading out their interests to the entire university, giving rise to the multiculturalism movement that spans nearly every program and department of the universities.
Student-run courses are a predominant occurrence in the university. Students at Stanford and UC-Berkeley fought for and created programs where it can be done for full credit. At UT-Austin they may take the form of conference courses in which students with a project in mind work one on one or in groups with a professor of their choice. Students may do their class projects or papers on topics that interest them, thereby indirectly redesigning the intent of the course. A few schools go even further than individual courses. Evergreen State University in Washington has an option for students to spend much of their undergraduate years designing their own degree program. UC-Santa Cruz has a heavy emphasis on environmental studies and is organized with on-campus housing dedicated to cooperative living integrated with academic studies. Goddard College in Vermont hosts the Institute for Social Ecology which offers summer undergraduate and master’s degree programs. Even the new UC campus in Monterey Bay has a public service requirement that will heavily emphasize political activism rather than charity work.[3]
No matter what form they take, student-run courses are fundamental to the reorganization of the university. Altenberg suggests that student-run courses may “integrate students’ academic program with their social concerns; provide a means to channel the university’s immense resources toward the urgent political and social issues of the day…; [and] create ‘free social space’ where ideas and aspirations that are unsanctioned and inadmissible in other social situations (classrooms, dorms, on the job, in the media, churches, political discourse, etc.) can be openly broached, shared, reflected upon, acted upon, and where new understandings can be developed among a group of people, who learn to work together, and can continue to work after the conclusion of the course.”[4]
Concern for the environmental crisis has begun to influence the direction of scholarly research projects as well. The original UCLA environmental audit, that has served as a template for many similar environmental committees, was first undertaken for a master’s thesis by two architecture students.[5] At numerous campuses, students and faculty are reappropriating class time – and their time in school itself – intended to train us to work to study the environment and sometime the university itself.
The Student Coalition for Clean Energy at the University of Minnesota-Twin Cities, decided to challenge the renegotiation of the 25 year, $1 billion energy supply contract by organizing an Environmental Summit and doing research into alternative energy sources in a graduate school energy policy class. Their research demonstrated that UM-TC is the state’s 20th largest source of sulfur dioxide, the main cause of acid rain, and has repeatedly violated its state issued air permit. The Minnesota Pollutions Control Agency charged that the monitoring equipment has been broken for over a year, that the university had failed to make many required reports and violated its opacity limits over 35 times. The coalition has distributed a petition, signed by people from 18 different organizations and academic departments, which was submitted to the regents calling for a switch from coal to natural gas. Making the connection to living conditions, they held a press conference at a “family student housing site next to one of the university’s coal burning steam plants, where residents live in the shadows of a huge coal pile and are exposed to noxious coal dust.” Much of the research that informed the movement was conducted by graduate students who used a required class to study the use of coal and alternative energy sources on campus and issued a report that seriously questioned campus energy policy.[6]
Students at Southern Illinois University-Edwardsville won a longstanding battle over the environmental impact of university development projects in Spring 1992. After fighting the campus administration’s proposal to destroy a large part of a mature deciduous forest on campus land known as the Sweet William’s Trail area since 1990, the local SEAC group signed an agreement with the administration to form an environmental oversight board that would make recommendations to the Vice President for Administration. The board will have an environmental audit committee and a recycling committee.[7]
Students at Oberlin College of Ohio organized the “Biosphere Project” that not only asks about trash and recycling but also the use of pesticides and herbicides, the amount of pollution (Oberlin creates about 15 tons of C02 per student per year), where the food is purchased and what kind of companies it invests in.[8]
At many campuses, environmental studies is far more than low-key individual efforts of students and faculty but are actually becoming integrated into the structure of academia. By one rough estimate, there are nearly 200 environmental studies programs at US universities, many of which are outgrowths of student initiatives. There are also environmental studies centers at the University of Colorado-Boulder, the University of New Hampshire and the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. UC-Boulder’s Environmental Center was central to the organization of the 1991 SEAC Common Ground conference. Students also created the UNH Environmental Center that holds a library and serves as a clearinghouse for information and worked with the UN-Lincoln student union to establish a resource center for environmental research.[9]
Aside from its numerous hypocrisies and capital’s attempts at institutionalization, Earth Day 1990 exposed a vast concern for the earth that already existed but one that existed on nearly every college campus – both universities and community colleges – throughout the U.S. That year, an advertisement was placed in Greenpeace magazine by students at the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill asking if there was interest in establishing a student environmental organization. After receiving a tremendous amount of responses, the Threshold conference was held on their campus, attended by more than 1,700 students and the Student Environmental Action Coalition (SEAC) was born. After their next conference, Catalyst, in Champaign Illinois, drew about 7,600, SEAC became not only the largest environmental student organization but the largest student organization since SDS with about 33,000 members at 1600 campuses in 50 states, including 750 high schools, and 16 countries by late 1991.[10]
The main current running through SEAC revolves around environmental groups intent on “greening” their campus by implementing paper, aluminum, and other forms of recycling, establishing carpools, cutting consumption by the campus administration, replacing styrofoam with reusable plastic cups and planting trees on or near campus. A smaller but growing current are intent upon conducting “environmental audits” of their campus that encompass an examination of not only the amount of waste generated by the campus but also the universities role in the building of incinerators, toxic dumping, the destruction of natural habitats, and local and international pollution and sometimes corporate and military ties.
While environmental audits have the potential for examining the entrepreneurialization of the university, it has mostly served to indirectly help university administrations problems with “waste management” and “energy efficiency” for example rather than creating new ones. Yet, environmental audits have provided a base of information about the university that SEAC is attempting to expand further to include research into the curriculum, corporate, military and other types of research and connections as well as the political implications of their investments both in the US and internationally. SEAC took a broad step by participating in the formation of A SEED (Action for Solidarity, Equality, Environment and Development), which was developed by international students who attended the Catalyst conference and have since set up offices in five countries. Originally linking up the struggles of students in numerous countries in preparation for the Youth ’92 meeting in Costa Rica to prepare actions at UNCED, Brasil, ASEED continues to focus on the international dimensions of the student movement and university development projects.
Carving Our Spaces at UT-Austin
While UT-Austin is being reorganized into an overt profit-making corporation, it faces challenges from within and without by people with different visions of what the university should and could be about, not only in regards to environmental issues such as solar energy research and cleaning up toxic wastes but also in emerging cultural forms, creating alternative learning centers, newspapers and even radio stations. Throughout the campus and UT System, people are silently and not-so-silently working on their own projects, many of which are antagonistic to the administrations entrepreneurial priorities. Below the surface of everyday events there appears a growing conflict between the commercial ambitions of the UT-Austin administration and its corporate partners, and students and faculty who have entirely different ideas about what the university should be. These “alternative” projects are quietly disrupting the mission of the university, which seeks to discipline students to spend the rest of our lives working on meaningless and redundant tasks.
I want to highlight only a few of the recent positive projects on campus by undergraduates, graduates, faculty and staff-projects that are thriving despite entrepreneurial activity and austerity. In the process of fighting against austerity, we need to recognize the many projects going on throughout campus and their implication for demonstrating the possibilities for transforming UT-Austin to serve our needs and desires.
Many of these activities fit neither the neat categories of “education” and “research”. A common mystification exists about the concept of “research”. The problem is not that research is squeezing out “education” (assuming the latter is somehow ”better” than the former) but that certain kinds of research – primarily military and commercially-oriented – are taking priority over all else. Neither research nor education in themselves can serve the needs and desires of people for changing the way we live: “education” can serve to either produce obedient workers or empower people to take control over their own lives while “research” can either reproduce the existing systems of power or provide knowledge that can help empower people. Contrary to popular myth, empowering research exists side by side with empowering education.
Empowering research has a long history at UT-Austin. In the 1960s architecture and botany students used a class to study the impact of then Chairman of the Board of Regents Frank Erwin’s planned destruction of a grove of trees to expand Memorial Stadium and law students spent time investigating then Governor John Connally’s role in profiting from the construction of UT-San Antonio and the LBJ School.[11] In 1990, an architecture student wrote an historical analysis of the use of architecture at UT-Austin to manage and control student struggles.[12]
Since the 1960s, similar kinds of research have continued throughout the campus without quite as much publicity or direct impact. Some engineering students and faculty are engaged research on toxic waste cleanup and environmental technologies. A couple of groups in the Center for Energy Studies, which ironically shares a building with the military funded Center for Electromechanics, are working on solar energy panels and the removal of toxic chemicals from water. Likewise, others are studying pollution in the Galveston Bay Estuary and other waterways. Engineering students annually design solar powered cars even though their research is being sponsored by GM and slated for commercialization.
In Civil Engineering, professor Earnest Gloyna conducts research on “supercritical water oxidation” which may be able to destroy waste, sludge and toxic substances in water. Gloyna’s work may soon be commercialized by some of the worst polluting companies and is part of a Defense Department toxic waste cleanup project. Moreover, Gloyna’s research would ironically help reverse the environmental destruction perpetuated by the military research of his colleagues such as Ben Streetman, Al Tasch and J.K. Aggarwal, who develop computer technology for automated weapons systems. Although Gloyna’s military backing raises the possibility of spin-off applications for cleaning up areas devastated by chemical weapons to allow troops to move in, the military would have completely neglected clean-up of its toxic waste had activists not exposed the widespread pollution and ecological destruction it has caused in the US alone and forced Congress to mandate cleanup.
The law school is home to some alternative projects as well. There are student groups involved in environmental protection law and civil rights. Professor Elvia Arriola studies civil rights, sexual harassment and discrimination on the job and feminist legal theory. In fact, Students for a Diversified Law School organized strikes in 1990 and 1991 to push for multicultural reforms, and a law journal called The Journal of Women and Law was formed a few years ago by a group of students. A professor even coordinates a student lawyer legal assistance program for people who cannot afford a lawyer, although it has received complaints for providing uncaring and inadequate services.
In the College of Liberal Arts, there are an endless number of research projects that exist just below the surface, financed out of the pockets of faculty and students due to the lack of administrative support or downright opposition. Anthropology professor Thomas Hester coordinates a summer field school which conducts archeological digs on upper Barton Creek unearthing hundreds of artifacts of hunter and gathering societies that once lived there. Such research can demonstrate the vital importance of preserving Barton Creek from development projects such as that being pushed by Freeport McMoRan.
There are wide range of other spaces in existence throughout the College of Liberal Arts. There are study groups in “Autonomist Marxism”, labor history, and Chicano/a studies that have been in existence for a number of years. Economics professor Harry Cleaver has been building an archive of books, articles, zines and other publications of what he calls “Autonomist Marxism”. Sociology professor Les Kurtz and a group of students and faculty have coordinated a proposal for a Peace Studies Program and organize an annual conference. Students working with the Minority Information Center have organized the “Women of Color Conference”, and in 1993 a number of people organized a conference on “Women and War” which featured panel discussions concerning the Gulf War and its effects on women and social movements in the US and the Middle East. During the Gulf War, the Progressive Faculty Group, the Chicano/a Faculty Caucus and the Black Faculty Caucus organized a couple of teach-ins on the war that were attended by hundreds of people as well as daily teach-ins by professors and anti-war organizers. Classes on AIDS, Gay/Lesbian/Bisexual culture, and a number of other topics originally began as study groups that became classes.
Philosophy professor Doug Kellner and Frank Morrow of the College of Communications have been doing a show on ACTV cable access since the late 1970s that offers alternative analyses of world events. The Center for Mexican American Studies is producing Latino USA, a weekly radio show for Mexican-Americans, that is being aired nationally on NPR. Anthropology professor Steven Feld has recorded the sounds and music of Papua New Guinea tribes while drawing connections to the destruction of the island’s rainforests which threatens their way of life. His last recording, Voices of the Rainforest, was done in conjunction with Michael Hart of the Grateful Dead.[13] Anthropology professor Elizabeth Fernea produced a documentary on peace movements in Palestine and Israel that was aired on PBS last Spring and has published a companion book. History professor David Montejano has served as an expert witness on the League for United Latino American Citizens in their successful lawsuit against the Texas state for its discrimination in funding higher education in South Texas. Government professor Anne Norton is involved in research on sexual harassment at UT-Austin.
Graduate students in Management Science and Information Systems of the College of Business Administration are conducting a study to find patterns of discrimination in the location of toxic pollution. To date, they find that minorities are most likely to live in areas badly polluted with industry and waste dumps. Dave Sullivan, a business graduate student, recently served on a UT committee to investigate campus recycling and conservation. A business professor conducted a study of the economic impact of the Save Our Springs Ordinance finding that the effect of restricted development on Barton Creek would not negatively affect the local economy.
The College of Natural Sciences is teeming progressive projects as well. Zoologist Mark Kirkpatrick has been a driving force behind the effort to have the Barton Creek Salamander listed on the US Endangered Species Act list. As of 1995, the US Fish and Wildlife Service has refused to accept its own staff biologists recommendation that it be included on the list leading Kirkpatrick and the Save Our Springs Coalition Legal Defense Fund (which has been fighting development on Barton Creek) to file a suit in federal District Court.[14] Astronomy professor Edward Nather does not need his own telescope to study the universe, he shares with others around the world. Nather’s Whole Earth Telescope links up about a dozen major observatories worldwide by telephone and electronic mail in the study of a star 24 hours a day. While UT is planning to build a new $12 million telescope in West Texas next to the already existing McDonald Observatory ($1.5 million of which will come from student paid general fees), Nather is helping to create a network of astronomers that can share equipment and research rather than waste millions of dollars building more telescopes which destroy the environment in the process.
Joe Frost, early childhood education professor, is internationally know for his work on playground equipment safety. He has done an extensive evaluation of Austin playgrounds which found “dangerous features on most of the city’s 78 playgrounds.”[15]
In the College of Communications, journalism professor Wayne Danielson was part of the fight among faculty in the Faculty Senate and University Council to implement multicultural reforms outlined by Project PRIDE and ONDA (which were written by the Black Student Alliance and Todos Unidos). Department of Radio-Television-Film chairman John Downing is known for his work on underground and alternative media, having written a book on the subject, and edited another collection of articles about films in the “third world”. Journalism professor Mercedes de Uriarte has been the faculty advisor for the Tejas newspaper which is produced by “minority” students and dedicated to minority student issues.
Although students are important partners in many of these projects, there are others that are strictly student initiated and operated. The recycling drums seen in many buildings is coordinated by the Students for Earth Awareness who recycle cans, bottles and paper on campus, eventually pushing UT-Austin to take responsibility for recycling newspaper a few years ago, which it dropped in late 1991 without telling anyone because they didn’t make enough money and then reinitiated by legislative mandate. The slate of multicultural reforms, some of which are still under consideration, (although the multiculturalism requirement was voted down by faculty), was almost entirely initiated by the efforts of the Black Student Alliance and Todos Unidos.
If it was not for the efforts of a group of student parents and graduate students in the mid to late 1980s, there would still be no childcare. A few years ago, a group of student parents formed the University Student Childcare Association (USCA), offering inexpensive daycare for 236 student families from 3 to 10pm Monday through Friday and 6 to 11 pm on Saturdays. USCA has recently expanded their hours of service. While providing daycare, the USCA along with other student groups fought to force the administration to establish a daycare program. USCA and Council of Graduate Students were involved in a committee formed by the administration that eventually led to a UT run service in 1990, in addition to the efforts of USCA.
For about four years students have been running the KTSB cable radio station that features music unheard on the commercially dominated airwaves. In 1992, the FCC ruled that KTSB must share 91.7 FM with a local cooperative radio station called KOOP. However, a number of station bureaucrats and the Texas Student Publications board have long refused to work out a cooperative agreement, delaying KTSB’s FM debut for three years and spending about $100,000 in student fee money on legal costs in order to control the whole frequency. Although KOOP has offered to negotiate a time sharing arrangement with the student staff – who have not been included in recent negotiations – for more than two years, they have been repeatedly rebuked, although some staff members pushed for negotiations. KTSB, now KVRX, eventually went on the air in Fall 1994 in a time-sharing agreement with KOOP. Students also formed Texas Student Television (TSTV) fought unsuccessfully to get an access channel on ACTV, and is now aired on channel 9.
The independently produced film Slacker is not as rare as one might be led to believe. Every semester, Film I, II and graduate film students screen their semester and thesis projects in Burdine. All types of independently produced films, from animation to spoofs of students trapped in the UT-Austin bureaucracy are featured, each one written, produced, funded and organized by students and their friends. Music students also hold concerts each semester to perform their music, while art students exhibit their works in the student gallery as well as participants in a number of performance art revues and events throughout the city.
Throughout the College of Fine Arts students are exploring and challenging accepted conceptions of not only audio, performance and visual forms but dealing with substantive political issues through reappropriated or newly devised mediums. Students now have their own space to exhibit their creations in the Student Gallery. Long limited to token spaces in the Huntington for selectively chosen students, the student gallery features much more than paintings but also pieces that incorporate video, lighting, film, audio, clothes, and live performance.
Music and theatre students also conduct performances of the pieces they have written and coordinated all semester or even longer. Although the College of Fine Arts has cut back the availability of resources to students to conduct full presentations in favor or practices that appears geared to prepare them for jobs rather than allow them to follow their desires, many productions still go one both through the college and a few new theatre groups. There is a Symphony Orchestra, ensembles for experimental, Brazilian, Caribbean, and other kinds of “world music” which any student can join by signing up for the class. There are also dance troupes, opera groups and a number of experimental and student-run play companies such as the Shadowland Players, the Weetzahs, the Barefoot Players, and The Broccoli Project.
Over the last five years there have also been many new student produced newspapers, comics, and magazines. A journalism class writes and publishes Tejas, which is devoted to the concerns of minority students and community members. The Black Student Alliance publishes The Griot periodically and includes many articles and poetry concerning black students and community concerns. A few former UT students (who also work on Liberated Learning) produced the Polemicist (now The Hot Blast), which provides in-depth investigative news coverage of community issues and UT-Austin affairs. The Polemicist was later followed by The Other Texan, an investigative newspaper published by graduate students and more recently (sub)TEX. There is also the University Review which covers UT and national issues from a moderate to right wing perspective. The University Democrats infrequently publish Foresight, which is mostly devoted to elections. At anyone time there can also be found a few music zines as well, like Powerball and No Reply, which are free. There has recently been a warm breeze of new independently-published local comic books, a number of which are done by former and current Daily Texan cartoonists. There also have been two compilations of local comics recently published, such as JAB, a testament to the overwhelming talent and interest around town.
There are other student projects only partially connected to UT that take place allover Austin. One of the best known was the short lived “free university”, Liberated Learning, allows anyone to teach or take classes in whatever interests them. Classes are offered on any topic if there is a group of people interested in learning about it. Liberated Learning also owns a press that anyone can use after taking a class to learn how to operate it. Thousands of zines, fliers, and posters have been printed on it by students and local residents for only the extremely low costs of supplies.
For a few years, Club Whatever could be found in full swing on the West Mall on Friday evenings. The Club offered bands a place to play for free,without the hassles of moneymaking clubs and bouncers. The Renaissance Market on Guadalupe Street is a city-run market that features a slim but interesting collection of pottery, jewelry, and clothes. Each merchant can only sell what they actually make themselves. This limitation has spurred the growth of a number of other people selling clothes from Guatemala, perfumes, locally made incense, and even books on black consciousness and history. Every Friday a Food Not Bombs group serves dozens of people free wholesome vegetarian food on the Drag. On the last Friday of every month a hundred or so bicyclists take to the campus and city streets to promote awareness and cooperation with bicycle riders. Hundreds of students are also involved daily in running their own cooperatively organized and operated homes. There are two different cooperative housing groups that feature vegetarian meals (House of Commons is entirely vegetarian with vegan options), and a couple with swimming pools. There are also a few independent coops, including one in North campus, and there was even one on Dancy Street in East Austin called Guff House for about three years.
There are also many students involved in performing music both on the streets and in many of Austin’s clubs. On almost any day, there are at least a few people, some of whom are or were students, playing guitars or having drum jam up and down Guadalupe Street. Many local bands that play at the Cavity Club, the Cactus, Liberty Lunch, the Black Cat, or Emo’s also feature students.
This is only a small sampling of projects, happenings and lifestyles ranging from the building of a solar car in engineering to housing cooperatives in West Campus in motion on and around campus. Although it receives the disproportional amount of campus resources, corporate and military research are merely one of many of the wide diversity of events and activities going on everyday.
Some people take varying amounts of time and effort to search out these free spaces in the university and some make them the focus of their lives at UT. This applies to both undergraduate and graduate, full and part time students (although we’re all really students whether we enroll or not). And if you can’t find something you like, you can always start your own project.
Although many of these activities are little known, their existence demonstrates that more is at work in and around UT than what we’re expected to do: study, research, worry about grades, stand in lines, and isolate ourselves from each other in preparation of a “life” of endless work. Aside from the alienating, irrelevant formal activities of UT, many people are spending much of their lives carrying out fulfilling and positive interests.
That a wide variety of independent academic and non-academic projects thrive at UT-Austin raises a number of questions for further investigation. Regarding those spaces focusing on environmental issues, in what ways do they differ or complement the ethnic studies, women’s studies and the multicultural reforms movements of the 1970-80s? Can these spaces further complement grassroots student movements to block environmentally destructive research and development projects? Will environmentalism be turned into another academic discipline and schoolwork? Or will further integration into the academic structures and even the development of degree granting programs institutionalize such projects? I have found these questions unique not only to multiculturalism and environmentalism but all such attempts to carve out spaces within the universities. As we saw with multiculturalism, to the extent that these movements fail to act with an analysis of the university as a productive institution of capitalist society, they will fail to either resist institutionalization, repression or the withering away into mere reform movements.
For instance, we find that some of these independently organized ensembles, troupes and newspapers are allowed to persist but when integrated into the formal organization of the university, those involved find themselves increasingly funding them out of their own pockets through new fees and higher tuition. To pay for them, they are forced to take on waged work that in turn drains them of time and energy often resulting in burnout and the demise of the project. The unwaged status of students makes such projects vulnerable to the pressures of entrepreneurialization.
Overlooking this process has resulted in the fundamental theoretical shortcoming among student activist movements since the 1960s that inspired this research. Overcoming this failing means reconceiving the relationship of students and universities to other areas of capitalist society.
Rethinking Our Strategies
In changing the way we look at the universities, it is important that we identify the sources of mystification that have crippled our theoretical, methodological and strategic development. By overcoming such shortsightedness, we can articulate the everyday relationship of austerity and entrepreneurialization to a wider audience of students than simply activists in efforts to both resist commercial reorganization while sowing seeds for our own reorganization or elimination of the university. I am not advocating that we need to change every student’s perception only that we change our own.
Rethinking our strategy could begin with the issue of student income, a primary concern of nearly every student and in turn an excellent starting point to organize a movement. Whether one receives support from parents, financial aid, or works for wage, students daily confront the issue of income as a means of domination and control over their own activities albeit choice of study, whether “to go out” or study, and even whether to drop out or stay in. The long term promise of pay-off from working hard in school often also dictates much of a students’ life. In attempting to organize students to confront certain issues and advocate change we overlook the force of income on a student’s decision to participate. Having to choose between speaking up or going broke, many students repeatedly choose the former. Unfortunately, rather than reevaluating our organizing strategies many activists simply write off these students as apathetic and continue to preach to the converted and often the financially secure.
Wages for Students as a Tactic
As long as the left and student movements neglect to openly deal with the status of students in capital accumulation, they will remain vulnerable to the use of austerity and income as a weapon of control, including the use of explicit wages tied to the work. In the 1970s, a movement arose in Italy with allies in the US and Canada articulating a demand of “wages for schoolwork”, a demand for an independent source of income that is not tied to work but can be used to strengthen the refusal of work. The welfare movements of the 1960s demonstrated that receiving social wages from the state does not necessarily result in the imposition of work since that money was used for many purposes other than what they were intended. Wages for students can be undertaken as such a demand that can offer a starting point for organizing a widespread student movement that could eventually transcend the issue of income.
While there are few examples of what could be consider “wages for students” tactics today, Todos Unidos’ demand that the minimum GPA requirement to continue receiving financial aid be eliminated and alternative aid be offered to students on academic probation so that they do not have to take on other work for a wage demonstrated a concern for the issue of income in organizing a broader movement. Focused on expanding enrollment and hiring of Mexican-American students and faculty and a reorganization of Chicano Studies and UT-Austin as a whole as part of the multiculturalism movement, Todos Unidos’ ONDA confronted the issue of income in order to establish a common concern among many Mexican-American students.[16] A common cause around income could become a starting point for organizing a movement with even wider concerns by ensuring that its participants continue receiving financialsupport if their activism should prevail over grades. Unfortunately, this insightful tactic never really took hold, nor was it picked up by other students.
The aim of demanding wages for schoolwork is not simply a demand for money, although that is one concrete outcome, but more a strategy to expose the unwaged status of students that allows business to profit from it. As Silvia Federici succinctly explains regarding wages for housework,
…to demand wages for housework does not mean to say that if we are paid we will continue to do it. It means precisely the opposite. To say that we want money for housework is the first step toward refusing to do it, because the demand for a wage makes our work visible, which is the most indispensable condition to begin to struggle against it, both in its immediate aspect as housework and its more insidious character as femininity.[17]
No work is the strategy while the tactic is the wage.
In 1970, Irving L. Horowitz foresaw the student movements of the 1960s beginning to deal with the issue of income and wages as they recognize that “students are the only members of the American academic community who are not paid for the work they perform.” However, he foresaw that rather than becoming a resource for struggle, wages for students would conservatize the movements as they begin to refocus on “economistic” issues of money that will subjugate them to a reliance on federal research money.[18]
Although it is impossible to say what would have happened if the students movements had begun to confront the issue of income, we can say that their failure to do so allowed the universities to use the lack of income against them. Facing rising tuition and fees and other forms of austerity, students began to redirect their interests from transforming the universities and society to getting a degree and income that would keep them above poverty and allow them to repay their massive debt. Without confronting the issue of income, the student movement did not become conservative or economistic – it was defeated.
We still cannot ignore the possibility that Horowitz could have been correct, that while facing the issue of income, students began to exchange the money for discipline. Without combining a demand for wages with a refusal of work, such demands are bound to backfire and become a demand for more work linked to a wage. Yet, the wage itself is less important than the strategy of exposing and refusing the unwaged work of being a student. To demand wages for students is to refuse the work of being a student in order to make explicit the unwaged status of students.
As the Wages for Housework movement demanded a wage without working in the home, by refusing to do that work, it “opened for the first time the possibility for refusing forced labor in the factories and in the home itself.”[19] It was not a wage that recognized the work they do, but a refusal, a struggle against work. We can learn from this in our struggles. Too many students take on outside waged work to make it through school. Demanding wages for schoolwork is a refusal of this extra work necessitated and hidden by our wagelessness. Grant explains how wages for schoolwork exposes the endless workday student face: “Like housewives, when we are not paid for the work we do, the state doesn’t care how many hours we work a day. But when we demand wages for schoolwork, we make visible all the unpaid work school involves, and we can begin to struggle, like other workers, over how much of our time we are forced to submit to schoolwork for how much money.”[20] Demanding the wage is to demand less work with pay. It can shift the use of grades as piecework IOUs on future wages to the payment of wages now for every minute of work done, not for each piece or their quality. It is an identical tactic used to end the same exploitation by piecework struggled against and almost eliminated by the working class over the last few hundred years.
Making the unwaged work students do visible, as Federici suggests as the key to the demand for wages, exposes the fact that capitalism is based on unwaged labor. Surplus value, which Karl Marx discusses a length in Capital, is no more than the amount of unwaged labor that can be forced upon a worker. The waged workday itself is divided cleanly between that part which a worker is paid and that which is not. As workers have progressively fought to reduce the length of work over our lifetimes, the year, week and day, thus reducing absolute surplus value, businesses have responded with a myriad of actions one of which was to increase relative surplus value (the intensity at which we work). Although Marx discussed this in terms of weavers being made to tend ever more and more machines as they increasingly pushed down absolute surplus value (the length at which they worked), his analysis is still useful for our purposes. As class struggle has succeeded in reducing the amount of work while pushing up wages (and fighting for holidays, health benefits, safe working conditions, and keeping the school year short) social leisure and outside work activities have increasingly been integrated into the circuit of accumulation.
During the 1920s Taylorism began to be increasingly applied to housework activities in order to understand how they could be managed so as to better reproduce the labor power of waged workers. Keynes’ premise that labor was an investment rather than a cost of production became the means for managing the international economy during the 1930s. What made this possible was the ability of millions of unemployed men and women who demonstrated and rioted to successfully force the state to pay for their reproduction of labor power even in the absence of work. The application of Keynesian economics to welfare established a formal productive role for the reproduction of labor power in the accumulation of capital. Reproduction was now recognized as contributing to the production of profit by increasing a workers’ capacity to work. Although Keynesianism was also being applied to public education in the 1920-30s, it was not until the 1950s when it would be extended to the universities. Otherwise known as “human capital” theory originating with Gary Becker and others, education became explicitly acknowledged for its role in production.
Housework, education and other reproductive activities (such as sex or shopping for example) have become fundamental to Toni Negri and Harry Cleaver’s concept of the social factory in which all activities, waged and unwaged, are productive to capital. The fundamental importance of unwaged labor to business becomes explicit in cases where workers are able to reduce the amount of work they do (thereby increasing the ratio of waged to unwaged work assuming intensity remains constant). Businesses will seek to transfer the work more to unwaged or lower waged workers by moving to another location within the US or another country where they can receive more unwaged work for the same or lower cost.
Entrepreneurialization is a prime example of this process. High tech and biotech companies, facing high wages, vast benefits, computer viruses and hackers, rising environmental opposition, and increasing scandals (which can be interpreted as caused by unproductive workers), are downsizing their in-house research and development and shifting that cost to the universities where it can be done by unwaged engineering and science students in university funded facilities. They are fleeing the antagonisms of the traditional workplace to the universities where they can presumably extract more unwaged work making apparent the function of entrepreneurialization as a response to class struggle. This use of unwaged students against waged workers can be directly combated by exposing the unwaged nature of school/work through the demand for a wage.
Demanding and getting a wage is also a refusal of the parent/teacher/wage mediation. It puts students closer, powerwise, to waged workers. With a wage, students have an independent source of power to refuse subordination their struggles to those of parents, teachers or other waged workers. What Selma James writes for black and “white” women in their struggle for the wage is applicable for students: “we need the autonomy that the wage and the struggle for the wage can bring…”[21]
The student movement “must confront the capitalist strategy of control in the university crisis which is predicated on the wagelessness of students. Students can only attack their wageless status through a demand for wages for schoolwork.”[22] The struggle for a wage becomes a struggle against the use of students against waged workers and division of students from each other. It is a demand for student autonomy within the working class via other more powerful sectors and in relation to capital. It is also a complementary struggle to those of waged workers such as parents who are under pressure to work harder and longer, and even mothers to take another job on top of unwaged housework, in order to support their unwaged children. Wages for students would also complement waged workers who are put into competition with poor students who would accept their job for less pay. Until the power of the wage or the lack of and the resulting absence of autonomy is appreciated, not only will students’ role in class struggle will not be fully appreciated but the class will suffer as a whole.
Summing Up: Entrepreneurialization, Student Autonomy and Class Struggle
This resulting autonomy can only strengthen the autonomous struggles of students over the past three decades. Student movements have been stubbornly resistant to attempts at centralization, left or “worker” domination, and for one group to speak for another or many. It could be suggested that autonomy has been the underlying characteristic most agreed upon by student movements even if they have not always worked in practice as they have in theory. However, autonomous organizing must be accompanied by a sharpened analysis of the universities as a productive sector of capitalist society if our isolated efforts are to be transformed into widespread movements.
Two published discussions among various UT-Austin student activists demonstrates the conscious reworking of the relationships between groups and hierarchies based on class, gender, sexual preference and race. Kathy Mitchell, former editor of the Polemicist, an alternative student newspaper at UT-Austin, recognized that a new strategy is evolving:
the more people who are speaking from different sites, the more we learn about how all those sites are interconnected. And that’s different from trying to create a general agenda because that is going to subsume somebody’s interests…When you have multiple sites and people connecting what they’re doing to what other people are doing, then you have a real powerful force for change, for mobilizing people.[23]
This reworking of the connections between these different struggles have implications outside the university for the working class as a whole. It is a reworking that is occurring throughout society: in the few remaining factories, but also offices, bedrooms, kitchens and even dance floors. The intra-class hierarchies are under attack. As women, “people of color”, youth and students fight for and win their own autonomous sources of power and forms of organization the struggle as a whole is strengthened. It has become very difficult to use one group to undermine a weaker or subordinate group. This is quite apparent through many movements, where women, gay and lesbians, and others have refused to have their interests ignored or subordinated to “greater issues” or “wait until after the revolution”.
This is coming to characterize the struggles at UT-Austin. Black, Chicana/o, Lesbian, Gay and Asian-american students have been organizing autonomously – no longer for only their own programs and departments to study their histories, spaces that have over time been isolated from the rest of the campus – but to demand that the entire structure and content of the university be reorganized to encompass their participation and contributions. In the process, multiculturalism offers a capability for refusing the left’s formula for class consciousness deriving from more study and unwaged schoolwork, and in the defense of the university as a social constant. We can see elements of the refusal of schoolwork and study of which a rejection of knowledge for the sake of control is only a part. Students are still not studying but struggling – transforming society by creating many “futures in the present.” This is the potential of multiculturalism. It is still a viable one. It has yet to be coopted in but minor ways.
In less than two years, the nature of dominant forms of student struggles have passed from agitation solely around international issues such as apartheid in South Africa, made “distant” by students’ own inability to connect the issues or even themselves to the campus. The “new” movements have favored autonomous self-organization over the party-like hierarchic organizing of the student left and analyze the student both in terms of the university and internationally. No longer will Black students allow so-called “white” activists to attempt to lead divestment movements they started, “whites” to let Black people speak for them, or Gay and Lesbians allow straights to speak for them. It is an embrace of multiplicity, a recognition that society cannot be transformed by one group for everyone else. There can be no liberation until all are free from all forms of domination. By breaking down a significant source of the conflicts within the working class based on the wage, wages for students should complement this desire for autonomy.
But what does it mean for our purposes for resisting entrepreneurialization? The contemporary environmental, anti-militarism and multiculturalism movements all have in common their need and demand for autonomy. This needs to be not only defended but further developed and expanded. Autonomy is the starting point for relating each of these movements so that they are complementary and continue to be autonomous. Concurrently, a class analysis of students and the university would help maintain the autonomy of students as a sector of the working class in relation to waged sectors, something that does not now exist. These movements have a great opportunity to not only coordinate their struggles and deepen the crisis of the universities but also become an explicit part of the class struggle thus concurrently deepening the crisis of capital as a whole as well.
However, to focus simply on overt expressions of resistance is not only incomplete but a strategic mistake. Everyday forms of resistance are occurring on a wide enough scale to disrupt the smooth operations of the universities. When students emerge undisciplined, unproductive and unsatisfied with the prospects of a lifetime of work, this too has a disruptive impact on all areas of capitalist social organization. While overt student movements confront the content and apparent public aspects of the corporate university, everyday forms of resistance contest its day-to-day forms. Complementary connections need to be made between the two levels in which the refusal of work discipline is acknowledged for its political implications. By utilizing a class analysis of the university as a productive part of capital accumulation and students (to the extent that they work) as unwaged workers, such connections can be made with ease.
Why demand “wages for schoolwork,” that is, utilize a class analysis that demonstrates the unwaged character of school/work? Failure to so in the past has prevented the veil of wagelessness from being lifted and allowed students’ newly won social wages to be turned back upon them as more work, preventing the evolution of the social wage into the political wage. New areas of studies carved out in the schools have been made programs of study and alternative tracks for schoolwork, grades and waged work. The Free Universities of the 1960s have become university controlled “informal classes” that serve in offering relaxing extracurricular activities for students that prepare their minds and nerves to do more schoolwork. These examples of capital’s cooptation of student’s newly won free spaces show us that without exposing schoolwork as capitalist work, the vehicles used to impose work on students Cannot be fully destroyed.
Students are already struggling for these social wages, but by explicitly demanding a direct wage for the work they do they can destroy the mystification of student’s role in capitalism. In the wake of numerous recruiting scandals in college sports there is some stirring for student athletes to be paid as a way to prevent manipulation of dependent athletes, compensate them for their work in generating vast revenues for the universities they attend and acknowledge college sports as an ad hoc minor leagues.[24] This has not caught on among student activists who tend to write off athletes as pampered and well supported by the universities, ironically overlooking how they too are exploited. Past student struggles have never gone as far as to demand a wage or concern themselves with the issue of income and have paid dearly. Increases in student aid and resources for their own projects have been attacked since the early seventies. Now in some places students are placed in the position of defending past victories before being able to move on to expanding them. These resources can be siphoned off because it was never made explicit that these were wages for the work students. Once the fruit of struggles, they are now mystified as “favors”, “privileges”, or “fringe benefits”.
Demanding a wage does not precede the struggle against work but flows from it. The current struggles students are fighting have brought forward the need to raise the demand for a wage. Without wages entrepreneurialization will continue unabated on the backs of tuition and fee increases, wage cuts for employees and faculty and other forms of austerity that result in more work. Even today, universities are resisting demands for multicultural reforms, environmental cleanups, and an end to military and corporate work with claims that they do not have the money to make these changes even all the while they are funneling millions of dollars into commercialization projects. The cutbacks bankrolling entrepreneurialization are legitimized by mystifying the cause of the crisis as structural-functional in nature rather than the outcome of more than two decades of student rebellion. Articulating a demand for wages can serve to demystify this reorganization by exposing the nature of the universities role in capital accumulation and not only student’s role as unwaged workers but also their resistance that has created the crisis. When students are finally recognized for having created the crisis, the nature of entrepreneurialism as a weapon against students will become clear. Without such an analysis students are once again vulnerable to massive tuition and fee increases, financial aid cuts, and other measures that will further intensify their poverty in an effort to intensify competition between them and put them back to work.
Demanding to be paid has the potential for turning around the use of the crisis against us by the universities. Since the crisis is rooted in the refusal of school/work and the organization of self-valorizing activities, wages would provide us the means to generalize these activities. Wages would be demanded because students refuse to subsume their lives to school/work. More resources means the ability to expand projects of self-valorization, projects that are inversions to work and lie outside and against it.
The demand for wages verbalizes the struggle against work by attacking the mediations of the grade, teacher, the antagonisms between students and against waged workers by eliminating capital’s ability to use student’s lack of income as a way to divide and conquer. There could no longer be a division or conflict between waged workers and students based upon the mystified notion that students aren’t workers because they are not paid a wage. So many conflicts generated by whether someone receives a wage or not would be easily overcome allowing many diverse movements the ability to figure out how they can complement each other based on substantial concerns and issues rather than the trivial existence of a wage. By doing so, demanding and getting the wage can help move us ever closer to a society whose members can organize autonomously around life and their own pleasures and not around work.
Is not a demand for wages for schoolwork only a limited reform that can be easily granted in order to ensure students keep working? Could wages just become a new source of control and manageability? Possibly. But “wages for schoolwork” is not a demand but a perspective. If the end goal is not to be paid to work but to abolish work and reorganize society in which we are free to pursue our own needs without want then the demand for wages is merely a tactic. As Sylvia Federici explains in her defense of the “wages for housework” movement, the demand is an analytical perspective that helps to make visible that which we wish to abolish.[25] When we identify the extent to which education serves to reproduce an oppressive social system we can better understand how to reorganize learning so that it serves a diversity of needs and desires freed from work
What I hope to have accomplished is to examine how the crisis of the universities is rooted in the struggles of young people who demand to live as they please, organizing their lives around pleasurable self-fulfilling activities that allow them to form new social relationships that are antagonistic to and transcend capital’s attempt to reduce all of life to work. By looking at how the crisis has transpired at UT-Austin, where I have been a part of many types of these projects, I hope to offer some ideas for how students can better understand not only what business has in store for them but what they have in store for business. Of course this is not to say that I expect to see millions of students rioting or partying in the streets (if they are not already after football games and during festivals and greek “rush”) but that students are hardly the “apathetic” minions of the establishment many “activists” make them out to be. There is something beautiful brewing just barely below the surface ready to explode unexpectantly and uncontrollably like the LA riots (and North American riots for that matter) or the massive outpouring of enjoyment from the brash rebellious punk of the band Nirvana or rapper Ice Cube that circulated through the airwaves, magazines and conversations of our generation.
This is becoming in increasingly so. The autonomy of students and the recomposition of working class struggle that it is a part of is not limited by national boundaries and threatens the international capitalist system as a whole. Student struggles are circulating internationally thanks to media coverage, the use of fax machines, computer networks and other vehicles. According to Peter Moore of Inferential Focus, a marketing intelligence firm that investigated international student and youth struggles most likely to sell to businesses: “Many protesters in one part of the world actually gain strength for their struggles from news reports of similar struggles elsewhere. The Nepalese, for example, gained momentum in their battle with the royal family from stories about youth protests in other parts of Asia and Eastern Europe. That type of linkage makes the concept of a worldwide generation gap even more apropos. Further evidence of a developing global youth gap comes from Western industrialized countries, which have recently experienced unusual rumblings from the young.”[26]
Moore warns of an increasing tendency to what Toni Negri calls self-valorization: “Some US youth have responded to this diminishing economic picture by establishing new priorities – for example, trying to focus more on happiness than material wealth. Others have taken to the streets and, like those who harbored the free-floating anger that precipitated the London riots, they represent a constant threat to the social order.”[27] He suggests that the nature of the conflict is different from that of the 1960-70s since it focuses more on economic and cultural than political issues, something we can interpret to mean are still obviously inherently political otherwise it would not concern him. “The new worldwide generation gap reveals the large spread between those inside the system and those who would enter in the near future,” he points out with a much weightier concern in mind: “In some Western democracies, youth protests reflect alienation from the institutional process and the first stage of what could be more violent conflicts ahead.” Capital has already recognized the rising power of student and youth struggles even if we have not yet.
It is time to abandon the rigid and archaic notion still commonplace among student activists that the university and students are somehow “isolated from the rest of the world”. Then-SEAC Threshold editor Chris Kromm expressed this all-to-common self-destructive sentiment when he wrote: “Part of what makes college a hotbed of dissent are their isolation from the marketplace, with a constant flow of ideas and (for many) ample leisure time. This closed reality, however, also separates students from the real world.”[28]
This dissertation was written with the explicit intent of dispelling such a myth. By recognizing the gradual, conflictual process of entrepreneurialization going on throughout US-based universities it is apparent that the universities are no longer on the margins of “the real world” but rather emerging as productive multinational corporations making essential contributions to maintenance of capitalist society. Since the 1960s revolution supposedly ended, inside University Inc. students have fought, protested, blockaded and taken over buildings to make themselves heard, stop activities they perceive destructive to students, local communities, the campus, and society. Students have stopped corporate, military and CIA recruiters, organized cooperative housing, opened up the curriculum, diversified student and faculty populations, and increased financial aid. Students have created underground theatre and music groups, newspapers, radio stations and organized environmental studies centers. We have fought, played, cheated, marched and danced. Now we must continue to do all of that while also demanding wages for students. To do any less could mean defeat once again.
Bibliography
[1] Lee Altenberg, “The ecological living group,” Threshold, October, 1991, p. 21-2.
[2] Lee Altenberg, “The student-run course,” Threshold, September, 1991, p. 21, 23. He includes a helpful list and addresses of programs at Stanford, UC Berkeley, UNC-Chapel Hill, University of Oregon-Eugene, Florida State University-Tallahassee and UC-Davis where similar programs already exist.
[3] According to Professor Doug Foley, UT-Austin, who was on the original planning committee who designed the campus, in conversation with the author.
[4] Altenberg, p. 23.
[5] UCLA Environmental Study Group and Earth Day 1990, Campus Environmental Audit: A Student Guide to Campus Environmental Change, 1990. The UCLA audit. In Our Own Backyard: Environmental Issues at UCLA. Proposals for Change and the Institution’s Potential as a Model, was a thesis project for the Graduate School of Architecture and Urban Planning at UCLA released in June 1989. This has now been republished as a handbook. See April Smith and The Environmental Action Coalition, Campus Ecology: A Guide to Assessing Environmental Quality and Creating Strategies for Change, LA: Living Planet Press, 1993.
[6] Robert Hogg, “Students fight against coal at the University of Minnesota,” Threshold, October 1991, p. 27-8.
[7] Cathy Zeman, “Environmental quality boards as a first step toward campus environmental reform,” Threshold, May 1992, p. IS.
[8] “Making Your Campus a Model,” Cool it Connection, v. 3, n. I, 1991. 9 SEAC, p. 52-3.
[9] SEAC, p. 52-3.
[10] SEAC. p.6.
[11] Ronnie Dugger, Our Invaded Universities: A Nonfiction Play for Five Stages, New York: Norton & Co., 1974, pg. 96-9 and 284-5.
[12] Mark Macek, “The Politics of Campus Planning: How UT Architecture Restricts Activism,” Polemicist, May 1990, p. 3-5.
[13] Voices of the Rainforest: Bosavi. Papua New Guinea, field recordings by Steven Feld, compact disc, Rykodisc, 1991.
[14] Robert Bryce, “Bunch Sues,” Austin Chronicle, November 3, 1995, p. 20.
[15] RU Steinberg, “Playscapes: Are Our Playgrounds Safe?”, Austin Chronicle, August 28, 1992, p. 1-8.
[16] Todos Unidos. Orientaciones Nuevas para la Diversificacion de la Academia (ONDA), Austin. Texas, 1990. p. 12.
[17] Silvia Federici, “Wages against housework,” in Malos, p. 217-223.
[18] Irving L. Horowitz, “Postscript: The trade unionization of the student seventies,” in Irving Horowitz and William Friedland, The Knowledge Factory: Student Power and Academic Politics in America, Aldine: Chicago, 1970.
[19] Selma James, p. 18, italics in original.
[20] Tim Grant, “Student as Worker: Wages for Homework,” the sheaf, March 26, 1976, p. 4
[21] Ibid., p. 17.
[22] Caffentzis, p. 141, italics in original.
[23] Utmost, “Who Does the University Belong to Anyway,” Winter 1990, p. 33-37. Mitchell, as we’ve seen, apparently only recognizes this in theory but not practice. The other group discussion was published as “Women and leadership: Interviews with UT women leaders,” Polemicist, December 1990, p. 6-7, 13.
[24] Ricky Dotson, “Sociology Teacher Says Paying Student Athletes Makes Sense,” The Daily Texan, May 9, 1989, I.
[25] Federici, p. 217-223.
[26] Peter Moore, “The rise in the revolutions of the young,” Los Angeles Times, May 30, 1990, p. D3.
[27] Moore; Antonio Negri, Marx Beyond Marx: Lessons on the Grundrisse, translated by Harry Cleaver, Michael Ryan and Maurizio Viano, edited by Jim Fleming, Mass: Bergin & Garvey, 1984.
[28] Chris Kromm, “Twenty Five Years After the Revolution,” Crossroads, Special Issue: “Youth and the Future of the Left,” September 1993, no. 34, p. 8; italics added.