Seeing in the Red: Looking at Student Debt

Currently exceeding $1 trillion, federal student debt in the United States has surpassed credit card debt, emerging as a brutal force of domination in contemporary universities and beyond.¹ As Jeffrey J. Williams argues, student debt “is not just a mode of finance but of mode of pedagogy.” It teaches that “higher education is a consumer service”; that career choices should be tailored to servicing debt; that the rule of the capitalist market is “natural, inevitable, and implacable”; “that democracy is a market” which obligates citizens to capital; and finally, that inequality is not a collective but an individual problem.² To paraphrase from the 2013 American Studies Association conference theme, the contemporary university of debt creates a hierarchy of value in which nonnormative immigrants, unpropertied, illegal, indigenous, marginalized, or queer others are cast as in debt or as “failed” subjects. For these and other reasons, the critique of student debt involves, in the suggestive phrase contributed to the conference theme by Lisa Lowe, “a critique of fidelity to the normative.”

In tonight’s address I attempt to center collective dissent to student debt in American studies. At the same time, I outline an American studies version of critical university studies. In his groundbreaking book Black Marxism: The Making of the Black Radical Tradition, Cedric Robinson argued that the construction of Black people as racial inferiors was not incidental but integral to the historical development of capitalism. Robinson coined the term “racial capitalism” to refer to “the development, organization, and expansion of capitalist society” in “racial directions” such that “as a material force” racialism permeates capitalist social structures.”³ Capitalism has been wedded to white supremacy, and anti-Black racism has helped make capitalist exploitation seem not only necessary but also right. Robinson subsequently developed this line of thought in his book Forgeries of Memory and Meaning: Blacks and the Regimes of Race in the American Theater and Film before World War II, where he argues that racial representations in classic Hollywood cinema constitute a kind of popular pedagogy of Black inferiority that reinforced racial capitalism.⁴ Similarly, I argue that the contemporary regime of university debt constitutes a form of racialized and gendered settler colonial capitalism based on the incorporation of disposable low-wage workers and complicity in the occupation of indigenous lands. The university domination of land and labor, I conclude, is pursued structurally but also ideologically, in film and other media representing campus life.⁵

I first began thinking about what would become this address in the wake of the mass student protests against budget cuts and increased tuition starting in the fall of 2010 in Puerto Rico, Europe, and the United States. Such protests at UC San Diego, where I teach, were followed in February by protests in response to a kind of blackface fraternity party called the “Compton Cookout” and the larger pattern of structural racism on campus that made it possible. A month later in March, as part of statewide protests against state funding cuts for higher education, students at UCSD in effect reframed the budget crisis as a racial project and the Compton Cookout as partly an expression of the kinds of privatization that further exclude students of color. That spring quarter, my colleague Yen Espiritu, an ethnic studies scholar, organized a team-taught, undergraduate course called California’s Public Education Crisis, and my contribution to the course was to create a digital archive of movies and TV shows filmed on college and university campuses in California, from the silent era to the present, and a companion lecture about the fantasies and desires for education encoded there.⁶ The result, which remains available on the “Critical Commons” website, is a project situated at the intersection of American studies, ethnic studies, visual studies, and critical university studies, and it is in that spirit that I make the following presentation.⁷

In 1970 a number of films about the crises in higher education were released, including RPM (or “Revolutions Per Minute”), which was filmed at the University of the Pacific (UOP) in Stockton, California.⁸ RPM focuses on a conflicted coalition...