Lend and Rule: Fighting the Shadow Financialization of Public Universities

Public and private universities across the United States are undergoing massive debt inspired austerity cuts. Departments are closing, tuition is increasing, and faculty and staff are being let go to meet debt obligations imposed by bond agreements with Wall Street banks and other private lending sources.

The future of public higher education in this country depends on a nearly invisible set of financial institutions and actors. How did it get this way? Who Runs Our Universities? Debt's Shadow Governance and How to Organize for Change answers the burning questions of how our lives are entangled in a debt economy, why debt is so hard to organize around, and what role does the university in our struggles against it.

Exposing the ways that institutional debt is a primary driver of austerity, miseducation, and the deepening historically racialized and gendered inequalities of U.S. colleges and universities, Who Runs Our Universities? reveals the "shadow governance" of debt and credit in United States' higher education and its impact on working conditions and learning conditions alike, through a revolving door of debt covenants, credit ratings, credit rating agencies.

In doing so, it develops an analysis necessary for our times: in today's neoliberal racial capitalist political economy, how do we recognize these shadowy forces making bank in a pervasive debt economy, resist their forms of governance, and collectively transform higher education into a hub for a just world. Part theoretical analysis, part toolbox for organizers in higher education engaged in debt abolition struggle, Who Runs Our Universities, is an invaluable resource for anyone looking to acquire a critical and transformative vision of higher education today, and get started on the collective journey to refuse the debt for education blackmail.

Offering cases and testimonies from public higher education campaigns the book highlights essential understandings, strategies, and reflections from the organizing work of public higher education workers, students, and allies in the struggle against debt financing. It offers far-reaching insight into how higher education should be financed and what this would mean for democratizing the university, making it a community project, rather than a project of Wall Street.