American Studies and the University of Debt

In his American Studies Association presidential address, Curtis Marez articulates an ambitious double project for himself and for the field: to “center collective dissent to student debt in American studies” and “to outline an American studies version of critical university studies.” As the address unfolds, he successfully demonstrates that many of the richest areas of scholarship in American studies in recent decades—such as explorations of the constitution of racial, gendered, and class subjectivities, identities, and hierarchies; and the transnational processes and relations in which the United States is situated—could and/or should, if they have not done so already, engage debt, and in particular “student debt,” “university debt,” “the university of debt,” as a constitutive force such that “the contemporary regime of university debt constitutes a form of racialized and gendered settler colonial capitalism.”

Generously drawing on and bringing together a wide-ranging array of relevant scholarship, he argues that student debt performs both domination and normalization, reiterating gender roles and racial difference as it colonizes futures and suffocates aspirations by tying people to low-wage work, and even to specific institutions. To make this last important point, he tells a compelling story of the connections his own students made between their relation to their university and the relation of workers to the company towns of an earlier era.

Although his own focus is on student debt, his references to university debt and the university of debt are important in that they signal the larger financial system in which the university itself is enmeshed. The university is not only the locus or medium for the generation of student loans that can be securitized and traded as financial instruments. (If you have a benefits-eligible job at a university that provides a “defined contribution” retirement plan through TIAA-CREF or the like, you might check the mutual funds in which your retirement savings are invested for “asset-backed securities” such as SLM or SLC or SMS Student Loan Trusts, for example.) But universities are also enmeshed in the financial system as issuers of bonds for building construction; and, of course, public universities are dependent on state revenues that have been affected by the collapse of mortgaged housing markets. Further, they are subject to accounting rules so that, for instance, Inside Higher Education reported in August 2012 that “a set of changes proposed by the Governmental Accounting Standards Board … is about to unbalance countless balance sheets” by requiring that public universities “list their share of the state’s pension liability, potentially billions of dollars, where they previously recorded nothing.”¹ Accounting rules that attribute greater pension liabilities (greater obligations) to universities, or governments, create ever more pressure to reduce the generosity of those pension programs, shift from defined benefit to defined contribution plans (thus placing the investment risk on the employee), reduce the proportion of employees eligible for benefits, and so on.

Debt is not an autonomous instrument of domination but rather the product of processes of attribution, ascription, writing, that distribute credits as well as debts and that are more easily revised by some than by others. Thus the e-mail I received a few days ago from “Rob, Kyle, Natalia, Aaron & The StudentDebtCrisis.org Team” that reads:

Did you ever wonder why student loans are treated unlike any other type of debt in America?

Do you think it’s right that student loans cannot be discharged or restructured in Bankruptcy Court?

The claim that student loans are singled out as nondischargeable is not entirely correct; child support, alimony, and taxes are also nondischargeable debts. And there are substantial constraints on the discharge or reduction of primary home mortgage debt in bankruptcy as well; you might recall the losing battle, in the wake of the subprime crisis, for “cram down” legislation, which would have allowed bankruptcy judges to reduce mortgage principle amounts. And, more generally, access to bankruptcy protection is a complex and differentiating process, quite useful in recent years to corporations seeking to free themselves from “legacy” obligations such as pension and other retiree benefits, less, if variously, useful to individuals for shedding their obligations...