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One of these days I ain't gonna.
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Change.
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One of these days welcome, friends, to another edition of Economic Update, a weekly program devoted to the economic dimensions of our lives. Our jobs, our incomes, our debts, the prospects for our kids, all of that. I'm your host, Richard Wolff. I've been a professor of economics all my adult life, and I currently teach at the New School University in New York City. I want today to jump right in because we have a very interesting interview, but I am more concerned with getting through quite a list of economic updates that need some additional. So let's jump. As I say, let's jump right in. The Economic Policy institute in Washington, D.C. issued a report on May 27 that was produced by senior economist Elise Gould, talking about the prospects for the class of 2015 people coming out of colleges and universities and high schools and their job prospects. Much has been said about this, and Lord knows it's an important matter. And I want to talk about it in the context of the quote, unquote, recovery that we are told has been going on in our economy. And I want to share with you then a statistic that stands, I think, as a pretty profound refutation of any notion of recovery. What Eli's Gould did and what the research shows is to focus on the unemployment rate and what she calls the underemployment rate. And I'll explain what those are in a minute among recent college graduates, young people, and among recent high school graduates to see what the unemployment is among that particular part of our population. They're a crucial part because what kind of job you get early in your job career has a lot to do with your whole career, what kind of job and incomes you'll have. So it's a particularly important moment to capture. If you're unemployed as a recent graduate of high school or college, it will have ramifications and implications for your entire work life, and that's why we're paying some attention to it. So let's go through the numbers. I'll go slowly so it doesn't confuse us with too many numerals. Okay. We're comparing 2007, the last full year before this crisis hit, and now right now, because we're dealing with The Class of 2015 folks that are graduating now. Okay, Unemployment rate among young college grads. In 2007, it was 5.5%. Today it's 7.2%. That's not a recovery, folks. That's a condition that is way worse than what it was before this crisis hit. We haven't gotten back to where we were. Not that 5.5% was anything to be proud about in the first place, but we're not even close to that. What about young high school grads? That's even more Stark. Back in 2007, unemployment among recent young high school graduates was 15.9%. One out of six. What is it today? 19.5%. A third worse. No recovery there either. It's worse now than before the crisis. We haven't recovered to that poor statistic as it was. But when we get to underemployment, then we get some really scary numbers. What is underemployment? It adds the people who are unemployed, but also the people who have a part time job even though they want a full time one. And finally the people who have stopped looking because they can't find a job. And they are what we either call discouraged workers or marginally attached. Those are the names the Bureau of Labor Statistics in Washington uses. Okay, here we go. For recent college grads. The underemployed were 9.6% 1 in 10 before the crisis hit. What are they today? 14.9%. That's 50% worse than it was before the crisis. That's not recovery, ladies and gentlemen. Not even close. And finally, let's look at the underemployed recent high school graduates. Okay, so we're counting those without work, those who have a part time job but need and want a full time one, and those who have quit looking out of discouragement. That number in 2007, 27%. One in four recent high school graduates back before the crisis hit was underemployed. And what is it today? 37% better than.1 third of recent high school graduates are in deep trouble in terms of their jobs and income. We don't have a recovery when numbers like that describe the unemployment problems of our recent graduates both at the college and high school levels. Next, I want to talk about unemployment yet again in a different way. This one has to do with the federal national numbers, the numbers given out by the federal government about unemployment nationwide. An enormous to do has been made that that unemployment rate back in 2009 was in the neighborhood of 10% and that that unemployment rate has now fallen below 6%. Isn't that wonderful? Well, the reality isn't what it seems to be. This needs to be explained, even though Lord knows I and other economists explain it all the time. Here's what these unemployment numbers mean. If you've wondered how do they find out that it's 10% in 2009, and it's under 6% today. They actually ask people about their situation. And here's how it works. They ask a person, are you working? If that person says yes, they're counted as an employed person. If the person says no, they're asked a second follow up question. Here it is. Are you looking for work? If the person says, yes, I'm looking, that person is counted as an unemployed person. But if that person answers the second question, no, I'm not looking, they're not counted at all. They are considered not to be in the labor force. They've quit looking in most cases, by the way. We know why. Because they haven't been able to find a job. Or the jobs they can find are so different from what they trained and educated and developed themselves for that they're not going to do it. At least not for a while. We don't count them as unemployed. Now comes the interesting part. If you look at the decline in the unemployment rate from 2009 to the present, here's what you discover. The reason the number went down is not because we've had a surge of jobs for people. Not at all. What we've had is a withdrawal of people from the labor force. People who were unemployed, saying to the question, I'm not looking anymore. Several million of those. That's why the unemployed shrank in number. Not because they got jobs, but because they quit looking. That's the reality of the statistics. So while it may sound nice, the reality is that in the lives of the people concerned, this isn't good news. It's a disaster. They don't even look anymore because the quality and quantity of the jobs are simply not there. And what that means is a smaller and smaller number of Americans are doing the work that the whole society depends on. That means fewer people contributing to Social Security, which makes its budget more difficult. And on and on and on. This is not good news. It's being spun that way by people who want to make the picture prettier than it actually is. And nobody, nobody should be fooled. Okay, let me turn a little earlier than I normally do to responding to some of the questions you've sent in. I want to remind you that our two websites are the perfect way to send us your comments, your criticisms, your questions to follow us on Facebook and Twitter to sign up for our free newsletter, things like that. The first one is rdwolff with two f's. Com and the other one is democracyatwork.info. that's all one word. Democracyatwork.info info and that will allow you to listen to this program at any time you wish to follow all the writing and speaking that I do and that others will be adding to our website in the weeks and months ahead. So now to respond to some of your questions. First one and I've gotten quite a few of these could you please explain the economics of lotteries in my community? This question went There seems to be more and more ways for me to buy lottery tickets, to bet on lottery numbers, etc. Etc. What is that all about? Why is this happening? And in one state in particular, the conservative governor has announced that he's now looking into this, even though he used to declaim against the immorality of gambling. Okay, let's look at it as an economist would first, the most important thing to understand is a lottery. Lotteries are another way to tax people. They are a tax that is wonderful because it isn't called a tax. What do I mean? A lottery gets out of the middle and lower class people lots of money. If you've ever wondered who buys lottery tickets, the answer is easy. State after state has done a little exercise. You make a map of the state and you little put a pin where the density of the population is a pin where people income is this and middle and low and then where the lotteries are sold. Crystal clear. The richer the part of the state, the fewer the dollars invested in lottery, lottery tickets and everything else. So lotteries as a general rule are something purchased by middle and lower income people. Nor is there any surprise here because what is a lottery? A lottery is a fantasy. The vast majority of people who buy any kind of lottery will win exactly nothing. Only a tiny percentage of the people win. So the government pulls a lot of money out of people who if you tax them for that, would be up in arms in opposition. But if you give them a fantasy for a few hours where they can imagine what they would do if they won, a pleasurable fantasy for sure, then they will give you billions of dollars in this country spent on It's a way for the government to tax middle and lower income people without calling. They take the bulk of the money and then they return a small amount to the small number of winners. Now let's take a look at that. Besides lotteries being a tax by another name, here's what they do. They take money out of the pockets of middle and lower income people. Money those people would have spent on water, on a hamburger, on life's needs. And that spending would have created jobs to produce all those things. Instead, millions upon millions of our FELLOW Citizens have 1, 5, 10, whatever it is, dollars taken out of their pocket every week. And that is either taken a big chunk of it by the government or it is paid to a few people who become very rich. Here's what we know in economics. When a few people become rich, they don't spend all that money, they save a good part of it. So in a time of economic difficulty where what we need is to have more people spending more money because that gives everybody else a job, we're actually through our lotteries taking money away from those who spend it, creating wealthy people who will be saving a large portion of it and not spending it. That's economic craziness. So let's face it, the lotteries are a gimmick, a way to raise money when you can't do it any other way. When the politicians are afraid to tax middle and lower income people because they don't have it anymore and they're up to here with it, they're afraid to tax corporations and the rich because those are the folks they depend on for their political jobs, their campaign funds and all the rest of the yet they want to produce good things that they can get reelected with services to business and to the public. So one of the solutions is the lottery. Take money out of people's pockets by calling it something else and in the process make the economic situation worse by taking money from those who would have spent it and putting it in the hands of a few wealthy people who will save it. This is economic craziness. And since we are not a crazy people, you have to conclude that otherwise smart people who understand which way the wind is blowing are behaving in a contradictory way that suggests they're under a lot of pressure. They're doing things that don't make sense because they're under too much pressure. It's a little bit like explaining why the United states, with merely 4% of the world's population, consumes over 60% of the psycho drugs that are produced in our society. Okay, second question. I understand that corporations are buying back their own shares in the stock market. Could you explain what that means, why that's happening, and what the implications are? Okay, let me do that. First, you are quite right. We have had record numbers of corporations going into the stock market, which is legal, and there they buy their own shares from individuals and institutions who own those shares. That is happening on a record pace in recent years, especially since the crisis. What's going On. Well, there are several things that are going on, so let me list them. There's no shortcut to doing that. First, you should be aware that corporate executives increasingly in recent years have had their pay how much they earn, tied to the value of the shares of the company. So if you're a president, you get such and such a salary, but then you get what's called stock option, the right to buy shares at a nice low price, or you get shares actually paid out to you as part of your compensation for your job. What that means is that high executives, CEO, cfo, things like that, have a very great interest in the price of the shares going up because it literally makes their compensation go up, since they're the ones who decide what to do with the profits the company earns. If they use the profits to go into the market to buy shares, they bid up the share value and that means their income goes up. So it's a way for people at the top of a corporation to boost their own income if they can drive up the shares and by using the company's money to buy the shares, they do that. That's one reason, but it's not the only one. Here's the second one. What else can a company do with the profits it earns? You might think that the wise thing, what you may have learned in school, is that the company will take its profits, or at least a big chunk of them, and reinvest them in the company. Grow the company, make it larger, make it more successful. The problem with that argument is it assumes that there's a growing market for whatever the company produces. It wouldn't make any sense to hire more workers or build another warehouse or outfit another factory if the end result, more output couldn't be sold. That would be dumb. And here's the problem. As the corporations look around, they don't see a world that's eager to buy a lot more stuff. They don't see that. And you know why not? Because the world is splitting more and more between a small number of people who, who have a lot and a vast middle and lower class who don't have what they used to. Net result, much less is being bought than used to be. So the companies all know that. And they're not going to invest their profits in producing more because they can't sell more. So what are they going to do with their profits? One of the interesting things is buy back their shares. That way they have fewer dollars to distribute to other shareholders because the company owns its own shares. It becomes a way of building up the value of your company when you can't in fact build it up by producing more. So that's another reason why companies are buying back their stock. Well, if that's the case, here's an implication. It is currently believed that somewhere in the neighborhood of one and a half trillion dollars with a t is the amount of accumulated wealth profits that corporations are sitting on that they are not investing neither in growing their companies nor for that matter, in buying back their shares. They're kind of sitting on it and they can't quite figure out what to do. And there's no sign that this is going to go away anytime soon. This has enormous implications. Let's be really that money could be invested, and if it were invested, it would provide jobs for millions of people. It could solve the unemployment problem in the United States. It could be used to do something about the unequal development around the world. That has a lot to do with the anger, the resentment, the envy, the, that stimulates war and all kinds of warlike activities around the world, as inequality always has. We could do something about these problems if that money were put to use solving them, but we can't do that in a private capitalist economy because those profits are owned by private capitalist corporations, and they have the private property right to do or not do with their profits or what they see fit to do. And they're not going to invest them unless they can make enough money. And so they sit on that. And we live with a society of vast unemployment and with growing inequality. That's a cost of capitalism that has to be kept in mind the next time people say they are going to weigh the costs and the benefits of it. Let me turn finally to a question that was asked recently of me about real estate in the United States. And the reason the question was asked was that I and others have pointed out that prices of property, particularly in certain urban areasnew York, San Francisco, and so on, are going into astronomic levels. We recently had a penthouse here in Manhattan selling for $95 million an apartment. I mean, it's kind of hard to understand. And the price rises in several other American cities are like that. Well, this has to do again with that trillions that are not being invested. If corporations have this huge amount of money and if they use part of it to drive up the prices of their shares by buying them back from those who own them in the market, well, then you're creating extraordinarily wealthy executives at the top. And you're also creating extraordinarily Wealthy people who own big blocks of shares and so become wealthier as the value of those shares are bid up. What do those people do with their extraordinary wealth? Well, it turns out they all want to live more or less in the same places. California, big cities, New York City and a bunch of other places in or around mostly other urban areas and some rural too. So they bid for one another to have the biggest apartment, the tallest apartment, the ritziest apartment. And so whenever this happensand this has happened in Europe and Japan and so on, we have what's called a real estate bubble, an explosion of prices when a few areas become the focus of enormous hoards of money, driving middle and lower income people out of those areas. They can't afford those rents, they cannot afford the home prices. You get these cities that become skewed between a handful of rich people and everybody else pushed to the outer boroughs or out of the city altogether. The real estate bubble and boom is itself a kind of sideshow to the extraordinary profits that are earned and held in the hands of very few people. Because in our capitalist system, we allow that kind of arrangement to persist. All right, folks, we've now come to the end of the first half of this program. I want to urge you all to stay with us for the break. We're going to have a wonderful interview with someone involved in the rapidly changing face of higher education in the United States. What is happening, why it's happening, what kinds of struggles are emerging among students, for faculty, administrators, and the public at large? I want to advise you again and ask you again, please make use of the websites we update and maintain them all the time. If you go to our2rdwolf.com, Wolff with two Fs or democracyatwork.info not only will they provide you ways to communicate with us, they'll also provide you with the Facebook and Twitter icons you can click on and follow us. In that way, you can take material, audio, video, written materials from those websites, share them with your friends, which we urgently invite you to do. Please make use of these websites. That's why we maintain them and otherwise. Do stay with me for the second half of our program. We will be right back. Welcome back, friends, to the second half of Economic Update. I want to begin by introducing the person we'll be speaking with in this second half. She is Sonya Sayers. She's a professor at something called the Cooper Union for the Advancement of Science and Art, an institution of great respect and renowned. And I'm going to open this interview since we're going to be discussing higher education by asking Sonia, whom I've known for many years, to tell us what the Cooper Union is and we'll take it from there. So, Sonia, welcome to the program.
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Thanks, Rick.
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Tell us, what is the Cooper Union? So everybody knows it's a great school.
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It situates in the East Village in a funky old 19th century building that looks out over this wonderful commerce of crowds and people. And it's essentially a school now of art architects and engineers who have been tuition free since 1859.
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So a tuition free, tuition free university since 1859. 1859 in Lower Manhattan. And so dozens of generations of young people have gone to school there, gotten their degrees and gone on to be important contributors in American society.
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Yes. The answer to that is yes.
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Okay, so let's begin by asking this question. How did it come to be a free institution in the first place?
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There was a workers movement in Europe in the 1850s that Peter Cooper, mostly an illiterate inventor, had a chance to see when he was laying the cable across the the ocean. And when he was there in London and Germany, he saw these workers free workers college. And he said, I have to do that. I have to come back. So he came back and with Astor and Carnegie, they sat around and said, this is the future of American education. At that point in time, American education was religious based. It had become elite. It had been a manufacturing place for lawyers and doctors and clergymen and upper class businessmen. And they said, we can't continue in that direction. It doesn't respect the future of America. It doesn't respect what's actually happening in our cities. So he built this funky building to actually make a prow between the immigrants of the Lower east side so that they could come through the building at all hours of the day, basically, and then join the crowd on Broadway. It really was a kind of intervention and a new term now, but classically designed at the time.
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So let me get this right so everybody understands. A worker discovered that workers in another country had free college education that they went to, became himself a successful businessman in the United States, hobnobbed with the biggest other businessmen there were, Carnegie and others. And these rich businessmen thought that one of the best things they could do with their money was to establish a university for everybody that would cost nothing. Exactly how interesting and different from the mentality of big businesses today, isn't it?
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That would be the struggle to get the rhetoric back and to open people's eyes that the direction of American education, particularly in the last 40 years has completely gone off track. It's just been dragged off track. Just let me remind you that as Cooper Union was free all those many years, so were large systems in this country. CUNY was free. The entire California system was free. Then came the neoliberal attack. Then came all the think tanks about how to reverse liberal education in this country. And fundamentally, they were able to reverse it by just withdrawing funds from the institutions and allowing this tuition inflation to take place.
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Tell me what happened at Cooper Union. Give us the inside story that you are a part of their. What happened to their free tuition program?
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We have an endowment. The endowment is based on the Chrysler Building, on a complicated formula. And over all these years, the endowment has been kind of a disciplinary action. You've been able to learn what that endowment generated, and you learned how to belt tighten when necessary. But that created a very lean, very spirited institution because we were so focused on making sure that every student who came to us had a complete tuition free. Your parents were millionaires. If your parents were impoverished, you were there at Cooper Union because you were there, we had simply agreed to take you.
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Let me ask just a small detail question. What was the criterion that allowed. How did you decide what students could come if it wasn't a matter of their financial capability?
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This is one of the struggles internal to the school until the tuition question became so put on our plates. It has grown elitist over time simply because we're the last or almost the last school in the country not to charge tuition. So that made us extremely competitive and competitive for other good reasons. It does mean that the engineering school is one of the most competitive in the country. The art. And you get into Cooper Union only by portfolio and home tests. So, yes, it has become elite because it's small and it was free. It was beautifully located and has a great spirit. But that's not what we're here to talk about. We're here to talk about how terrific it is to be in a situation where students simply aren't watching the meter in the classroom and for their future. Now, they were the ones that when our new president came in and said that he anticipated charging tuition. They began the fight about four years ago. And it wasn't too long before the faculty really joined up. And I think that was the greatest moment we've really experienced as a faculty in a long time at Cooper Union.
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So when did they start charging tuition? When did they end?
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The first year Is the first year.
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This last year.
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And as the former students fought, they kind of handed them Baits saying, okay, we'll protect you. You're not going to be charged tuition. So really what people were doing were taking a lot of risks with their own education for a benefit they wouldn't receive. In other words, they were fighting for the future of the school. So the next four years would be different for them.
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Even though they were protected.
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That was the bait. That was, get out of my office. Start occupying the bell tower, get out of the president's office. You won't be touched, you'll be protected.
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Right. It's a little bit like the two tier wage system in factories where the workers there are told, we'll keep paying you, but all the new ones will get paid half of it.
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A classic managerial sleight of hand.
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Tell us how administrators, faculty and students have reacted to the end of a free education at Cooper Union. What's been the response?
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One of the difficulties in an academic institution is that, you know, people slosh in and slosh out over a period of time. Continuity is the question. The faculty protects the continuity of the school. And my deep concern was that they would never energize themselves, that they would simply give in to this entire shift in American education. They wouldn't see their role as the torchlight of a future. They would just say, okay, it's kind of to the end of the era, and they'd collapse. That didn't happen, Bill. That didn't happen. So that's what I'm so pleased to talk about today. Please tell us we're divided between four different units. We hardly had a chance to talk to each other. And then these were these spontaneous open meetings and 2/3 of the faculty would show up saying, we have to do something. We have to protect free tuition at Cooper Union and consider all the important elements that will disappear if we don't protect that basic relationship between faculty and student. How do I describe that to you? The penalty now for students attending most colleges is so severe that they bring that depression to the classroom and they make arguments about what's happening to them on the basis of a future that looks so bleak and debt readiness that that's going to be so cruel that the classroom has become basically a very demoralized place. At Cooper Union, it was never the case. It was always bursting with energy. It was always vigorous. You could push your students as hard as you wanted to. They were allowed to float any trial balloon they thought was important. They got a lot of interaction from the other students. And then you'd come in with vigorous critiques. I would say if anything, at Cooper Union, the model of the critique perhaps overcharged, but that's the model of education. At Cooper Union, they put forward their ideas to their fellow students. Teachers come in, sometimes other teachers come into the rooms and they go at it. So it's a school of invention, free ideas and a lot of sense of protecting and building the creative gifts of the student in front of you.
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In other words, let me play the role of economist here. When you cut the funds to a university and you make the students pay, et cetera, et cetera, instead of this being seen as somehow inefficient allocation of resources, you're telling me that in the case of Cooper Union, and in your judgment more broadly, it undermines a major part of what education is.
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I can simplify the enemy of education is alienation. In order for you to really be with me, follow me on this journey, or for you to lead me on a journey down any intellectual path or creative path or new thinking path, we both really have to agree that this is an exciting thing to do and mutually rewarding and it's going to sustain all the difficulties of along the way, strip that away. You're simply lugging through, you know, the history of universal ideas. You're struggling to make sense what students pains are. They're struggling with all their personal issues. But there isn't that adventure. It can't be. It hasn't been supported. We did support education in this country. I hope your audience understands. It was eroded, kind of fantastically eroded. Now Bernie Sanders has put in some pretty strong proposals to reverse that. It's right now being elevated to a national debate, and some interesting numbers fall out of that debate. Public institutions charge about and gather in through their tuition mechanisms, about 60 billion. But the Department of Education is already funding US education itself, 77 billion. So right away you can make just some simple numbers and say, God, we could go back to really supporting public education at the higher education level almost at the same amount that we're allocating right now. It's a complicated formula. Private institutions will bulk considerably. They did in the 60s, they did in the 70s. They came back to their think tanks and said, you're making suny, Buffalo, Stony Brook, the University of California so good that we can't really compete. So that was another element of kind of withdrawing from the rights to build excellence into higher education at the public level. It was just getting too good.
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And so a major role was played by private institutions that didn't want the competition from much cheaper public institutions, which.
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Will, I think, will be still part of the debate. As Sanders proposals go anywhere, that will be the backlash.
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Yeah. It's a moment when the private institutions claim to be engines of civilization's development are playing the exact opposite role. It's also why in most European countries, for example, there is no private educational sector. It's all public education.
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Or they nationalize it like they did in Canada. They just said, this is too complicated a system. It isn't working for people. Let's figure out a way how to keep certain institutions traditionally doing what they're doing. But let's make the funding more general and kind of bring it into one system. Sure.
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Alongside and interwoven with the struggle over tuition. And I want to come back to that in a minute. Tell us about a second phenomena which I assume has happened at Cooper Union, as it has in so many other institutions, that the relative wealth and power of the administration has grown at the expense of other parts of the university. Has that happened and with what consequences and how does that work?
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There are people working on the numbers. And I think you have cautioned me, and I caution myself to be careful about the junk statistics out there. But there have been some very careful studies. And the inflation is at least two to four times over what the faculty and facilities and basic running costs are to the administration. And when they take those numbers, they're looking at vice president levels and their immediate staffs. They're not looking at people who are working in the business office, the budget office, on the grounds, and so forth. They're looking only at the highest level of corporate style management. And that inflation numbers are just astonishing. We can't see their purpose. We're looking over and over again in this. We're seeing, you know, vice president for academic development, vice president for alumni relations, vice president for, you know, external development, vice president for Curriculum review. You know, they just keep proliferating like mushrooms in a field. The great crisis is that they robbed faculty. 70% of the faculty now are peace workers, meaning they only teach per course. They live in utter precariousness. They don't have offices.
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The adjuncts, as we call them.
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As we call the adjuncts. I hate the word. I can't even swallow it anymore. It's the faculty. It's basically the faculty they have figured out to turn the faculty into factory workers who come in only for their moment on the stage and leave. I did it years ago because so many people in the PhD world begin that way. It's part of your training to be a teacher and to be a Professor But I calculated at one point that I wasn't making minimum wage, not even close to it. The present calculations are about $3 an.
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Hour is what it works out to.
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For many, particularly in the liberal arts, because by the time you prepare your course, build your resources around, around it, teach it well, keep yourself fully informed about your work, meet with your students, do their work and so forth, it comes out to be less than minimum wage. So we've taken our most educated component of our workforce and simply brought them down to the lowest level of any worker in the United States.
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Meanwhile, the administrator is making more and.
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More money creating full time jobs for themselves at extraordinary salaries and their staffs and so on and so forth. Many times we can't even figure out what they're doing.
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You know, that replicates corporations. Corporations have had the same over the last 30 years, same wild inflation of the executives at the top at the expense of everybody else's situation. So it's so interesting that the university replicates the business community in, in these anti educational ways.
- [40:41]
B
About 30 years ago, academic mostly in the left, it's true, began talking about the corporatization of the universities. And they've masked one excellent book after another after another. And I'd say it reached a kind of critical mass in the 90s. Without any ability to change the direction, the rhetoric and the critique are there. It's laid out perfectly without any real movement. There's been in a movement to unionize the adjuncts. They only get, you know, crumbs basically. But watching the basic structure of the professoriate being defeated with one of the crushing blows to any profession ever at any time, and saying so little and being able to mount so little an objection. There are reasons for that. We could go into the nuance of how academic mental life works. You and I have been in it all our lives. We can guess it very, very well. You know, deans become very, you know, have inflated salaries. They begin to see themselves as linchpins in the curriculum because they can, they call it place fillers. They can keep moving people around and pushing them into place. Filling it becomes a Fordist model of education. And you're right, they only look on the other side to corporate salaries and think of themselves as being victimized in some way. They're only making half a million, 2 million, 4 million. The one that really makes me angry is when presidents of these university systems get up and say, well, I'm like the mayor of a decent sized city. There are 30,000 people. I need to concern myself with I said to myself, a mayor that's making a million dollars. Show me a mayor that's making a million dollars, I'll show you a crook.
- [42:21]
A
Yes.
- [42:22]
B
Period.
- [42:23]
A
Yes.
- [42:23]
B
There's just such an imbalance in rhetoric and understanding and perspective. But most crucially is that you cannot have an abused faculty person standing in front of an abused student and have the journey that I just described. You can't have it.
- [42:39]
A
Tell me, I don't mean to put you on the spot, but are the professors and or the students at Cooper Union, are they mounting an effective struggle? And however you answer that, tell us a little bit about what has happened there as a case study.
- [42:58]
B
I think they were so brilliant. They occupied. But during that occupation, they opened the door and they said, the president said we had an open door policy. So we're walking through the door. All that time, days, Months. Months that they occupied the president's office. They sat around trying to figure out what to do for Cooper Union. They were on the phone, they were masterminding projects, they were sitting out laying major concerns. Their argument was, because American education has run so far in the wrong direction, anyone who comes into American education now is basically contaminated by a set of ideas that have not been examined. So they sat down and examined those ideas. They were brilliant. Now, they also knew that they had to take action. So in this process, they created a lawsuit and they laid out 100 different concerns that they had brilliantly written up. And then the lawsuit was supported by several faculty persons, alumni. You have to have that when you go to law. And virtually forcing Cooper Union to reverse its tuition status question, to get the proper oversight on the endowment issues and to go and to restrain the management inflation model. They're actually in court fighting it in the meantime.
- [44:22]
A
So it's not been resolved yet in the courts?
- [44:24]
B
No. The first case was heard. The first hearing was August of last year. The judge has not ruled. In the meantime, Schneiderman, who is the District Attorney for the State of New York, has agreed to examine all the books at Cooper Union that go through all its financial history, which is a very, very big stick. So we're in a kind of effective struggle. Can I prove what the outcome is going to be? I can't. But they're putting out some extraordinary energy. They've done what Cooper Union was really designed to do, to be a kind of flagship of new ideas and different directions, and they've taken that impetus and really have run with it. I thought, really, that four years ago I was standing in the last woods, the last sequoia of California. You know, a voice in the wilderness crying out, no, no, this can't be happening with the buzz saws just down the road. But that's not what's happening.
- [45:24]
A
Do you see it anywhere else?
- [45:29]
B
Canada, if you remember, had a big strike.
- [45:32]
A
Montreal particularly.
- [45:33]
B
Yes. And some of that energy came back and forth across the border to our Cooper students. There are strikes all over Europe, of course. And as I listened to your statistics today, Rick, the poor portrait of our young people in this economy is almost exactly the same statistics that European young people are facing, only they've got their national attention. We don't seem to have it here. So I'm very excited about the efforts of students and faculty at Cooper Union and want to recommend to your viewers that they see this film called Ivory Tower.
- [46:10]
A
Ivory Tower by Andrew Ross.
- [46:13]
B
It was actually funded by cnn, believe it or not. But he takes up the question of what happened to American education over four big movements, how it's diversified and then how it got into this tuition bubble. Management tuition bubble, I would argue. And then features the struggle at Cooper Union. He didn't intend to. He had finished the film when he heard that the students were occupying the president's office. But then he got so involved. They're very attractive students, very seductive and attractive students, particularly how importantly and intelligently they laid out the big picture in.
- [46:50]
A
The time that we have left. An old idea of people critical of this direction you have outlined has been that colleges and universities could be, should be places where faculty and students together manage the whole process, organize it, staff it, run it, and that the management, the administration should be back to what it ought to have always been, a support for something that is basically a project of teachers and students. Is anything like that percolating again either in Cooper Union or elsewhere, as a broader notion of reorganizing education?
- [47:31]
B
I'd say that the lawsuit, if I could just make a very simple case, the lawsuit revivified those very questions about what does it mean to take the endowment back into our own hands, to sit down and actually think about the finances of the school as something that we actually determine and that we allocate the funds appropriately, we build the departments and the programs through our understanding, a really fine understanding, understanding, not these barriers, not the lies, not the disinformation, not this antagonism, but actually say we do it now. There would be issues, there would be issues about whether you continue to unionize under that if you become self managed. There are all sorts of big questions ahead of us, but I can honestly say the conversation's now being brought back to the center of this institution.
- [48:18]
A
Wonderful news. This is really wonderful news. You know, it reminds me, a few weeks ago I did a segment when folks involved contacted me, a little women's school in Virginia, Sweet Briar College, in which a few administrators closed the university claiming financial exigency when a group of, in this case, alumna said there wasn't any. And lo and behold, they're now also going into court. And it turns out that all kinds of other interests, developers and others, have their plans and their eyes, and that there's a kind of privatization of education, often very grubby going on, that lies behind the ending of education and subordinating it to the kinds of calculation that not only business, but even rather seedy business normally engages in.
- [49:15]
B
Many right here in New York City, I think several of the Union Theological Seminary and a few others were sitting on property now so inflated by the very system that you just described that they actually discovered that their own president was selling out it as a real estate deal. And then they had to fight directly. And then he found ways to actually fire senior and tenure faculty because they spoke up. And these terms. And yes, this is some, you know, in some cases, the real estate is far more valuable to the predatory classes in thinking than the actual purpose of the institution. That education is the purpose of the institution is by and large very remote from most of the administration's point of view.
- [50:01]
A
Any final words in the seconds that we have left?
- [50:04]
B
Seconds? Oh, no.
- [50:05]
A
Yes. This goes quickly, doesn't it?
- [50:06]
B
It goes very quickly, Rick, thank you.
- [50:08]
A
For others like yourself, for the countless faculty members, even those that are lucky like you and I, to have had reasonable academic appointments before this conversion to adjuncts took place. Any lessons, any words of wisdom or encouragement from COPA Union that they might take away from this interview?
- [50:28]
B
Even the New York Times said that the lawsuit was so fundamental to the errors of the last 30 or 40 years that nonprofits even outside of academia have been making that if it goes forward, if we actually get the revelations and the exposures that we think we can have, that all boards of trustees sitting on all nonprofits are going to have to think twice. Do understand that boards of trustees have insurance policies, policies against their own bad Judgments? I think 85 million at Cooper Union. But if it turns out that there's malfeasance or even negligence past that number, it comes out of their own pockets. So this is a very different moment. It's really wake up moment. And I actually think Bernie Sanders proposals in that scared moment, because you and I know it's only when capital gets really scared, when their own pocketbooks begin to be be kind of, you know, looming open to them, that they actually begin to think, well, maybe we've gone too far. Let's roll back, let's reconsider.
- [51:33]
A
And that's really happening in education and across the board as Americans come to terms with the power and the abuse of that power of corporate boards of directors. Professor Sonia Sayers, Cooper Union, thank you very much for being with us. And I'm sure it has sparked a lot of thinking in the minds of those listening and watching. Thank you very much.
- [51:54]
B
Thanks, Rick.
- [51:56]
A
And for all of you again, let me close today, reminding you, please make use of the websites that we sustain for you. Rdwolf with 2F's.com democracyatwork.info I want to thank again, truthout.org, that remarkable daily source of news and analysis that really informs an intelligent and interested citizen. Check them out@truthout.org Please know that we are looking for more stations to carry this program and for places that might want me to come and visit and give a talk as I do around the United States. Use our websites to let us know of any of these opportunities that we can pursue. Make use of what's on these websites. Share it with your friends and associates in social media. That's what it's about. We want to partner with you. Thank you very much. And I look forward to being with you again next week.