Die, it's better
I just finished Sally Rooney’s excellent new novel Intermezzo, and I’ve also been sitting with the feeling of the moment: the lifeworld, our politics, the milieu. So this week’s post is a Rooney-inspired stream of consciousness prose-poem, a kind of negative dialectic mimicking her style, but focusing on PK-12 and higher education finance right now.
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Anxiety. The wave, whatever you want to call it—fascism? authoritarianism? hypertechnofeudalbufoonocapitalism?—is crashing, flowing. Education is particularly intense.
We’re looking at generational changes here, history happening, what might. K-12: A national voucher tax credit underwrites state policies that set thresholds for attendance at traditional public school districts. The school districts dissolve or change into managers of private school markets, bursars and disbursars, more like an arm of a church apparatus that coordinates the movement of federal tax expenditures on parochial schooling than a secular institution.
No more property tax. No more income tax. No more public programs, just a thin line of charity leaving the working class in the dust, clawing for a set of poor rates. Party like its 1825. This happens in the ‘red’ states that were once ‘purple’ that were once ‘blue’ and now are locked up tight, one party state governments in a federal milieu defined by the Federalist Society, not federalism.
The ‘blue’ states soldier on in some kind of echo of social democracy. But how to pay for it? Higher taxes. Capital flight. Contraction of budgets, reductions in force in the districts, private school enrollments increase with tax incentives, families move, dislocations, housing prices decline in some places, enrollments decline, per pupil dollars decline. State budgets reduce aid. Sclerotic special education support with increasing needs for a population accustomed to expecting and receiving accommodations. Heightened needs post-pandemic. Unions try to hang on.
The ’red’ states revert back to 1850s settings. Child labor. Company scrip. Billeting. Churches run the semblance of social programs. They rename everything. Arkansas now Waltonia. A bill in the Senate to rename America Teslatown.
Fewer and fewer kids due to fertility rates dropping: 21% since the financial crisis of 2008. People can’t afford kids, don’t want to bring new people into the world. Below replacement rate. Can’t fill the kindergartens, whether public or private schools. It’s giving Children of Men.
Modern Monetary Theory’s evil twin: the federal government funds nothing, only prints money to for repressive force, theological purposes, evangelical-techno-creationism in the money supply and the curriculum: no more antiracism, no more trans awareness, people in closets.
Tax exemption of municipal bonds, gone. Local governments such as they exist go directly to private banks for higher interest loans, shorter-term, no more cheap-ish liquidity, no more Mr. Nice Market. Used car salesman entrench in the regional ruling classes. Neoliberalism in retreat, or maybe such full flourishing that it becomes what was within it all along: charters schools weakened big districts, austerity put the districts deeper in debt, per pupil funds seeping out like never-healing open wounds in a behemoth. At some point the giant runs out of blood and energy and has to fall.
Climate disasters happening unexpectedly in every location, who knows where it’ll be next. Don’t look up. People gather in the old public school buildings since they’re public and sturdy but now falling apart, no longer the refuge from cold, heat, water, drought, fire, shortages, blizzard, tornado, hurricane.
And that’s just pre-college.
The university terrain is a bit unspeakable. Thirty years of neoliberalism left institutions both public and private hooked on debt. 85% increase in university bond issuance between 2007-2018. They took out the loans making big bets on development: build nice dorms, new flower beds, food courts, apartments, mixed use, and students will come. They’ll pay tuition. Their families will come and buy food. Storefronts renting space to serve them all their wares. Whole Foods. Chick-Fil-A. Chipotle. Increases in tuition due to projected increased demand, relying on state aid less. New logos. Better baseball teams. Sponsorships. Private housing in the public university, run by LLC subsidiaries university-adjacent but juridically and financially not part of the university but uses university logos, colors, trademarks, marketing. Private public partnerships.
Turns out enrollments depend on transfers from community college. Immigrants predominantly going to those, but now they’re afraid to go to class because ICE might be waiting for them or their fathers or mothers or brothers or sisters at the Info Commons entrance or bus top and they don’t want to risk it. Enrollments down. Transfers down. Tuition down.
Proles can’t afford the increasing tuition in the debt-development plans. Can’t afford privatized housing. Can’t afford Cheesecake Factory. Have to work. Where? Fulfillment centers.
Rich students still go to elite institutions, but it’s different. There’s a 30% tax on endowments that funds American Academy, a cheap online degree machine pitched for men entering call center jobs or management. Sorry to Bother You. No more big institutes, grants, lectures. Just quiet reproduction of the ruling class. Professors writing critical lecture notes on small pieces of paper, passing them around, last student to read it has to burn it. Influx of Russian international students to institutions complying the best.
Most exciting institution: University of Greenland, hiring 50 tenure-track positions across geophysics, geoengineering, shipping, petroengineering, military psychology, physical geography, Patriotism Studies.
The new message, generally? Don’t go to college. Especially women. Have babies instead, go to church, be homemakers, no need to study anything. Increase the fertility rates. Vote Republican. No abortions. If you die, fine, it’s better. America first.