Ivory Tower Graduates in the Red: The Role of Debt in Higher Education

• In Event: The New Academic Labor Market and Graduate Students: A Symposium for Understanding, Reflection, and Action

Abstract

The purpose of this paper is to shed critical light on the financial hardships that many individuals, the first author included, experience while earning and paying for advanced degrees. As a young tenure-track assistant professor of educational foundations, Nicholas shares his personal experiences of incurring a great amount of student debt while earning his Ph.D. The second author, Lucille, an older associate professor, analyzes his account from a critical financial perspective, and both authors conclude with recommendations for all Ph.Ds.—whether newly minted, up-and-coming, or long established—especially those in the field of education.
Although anecdotes and auto-ethnographic storytelling are considered by some not to be as credible as statistical data are, it is our contention that more scholarly counter-narratives (Bamberg & Andrews, 2004; Bochner, 2012) should be written in order to better understand how injustice affects people in their everyday lives, including those in academe. Counter-stories have the power to elucidate financial realities that otherwise would not be shared or known. These stories have the ability to counteract the bon sens that the general public believes to be credible but that the disenfranchised know to be invalid and incorrect. We agree with Noam Chomsky, who wrote, “Students who acquire large debts putting themselves through school are unlikely to think about changing society. When you trap people in a system of debt they can’t afford the time to think. Tuition fee increases are a disciplinary technique, and by the time students graduate, they are not only loaded with debt, but have also internalized the disciplinarian culture. This makes them efficient components of the consumer economy.”
What can and should we—up-and-coming, early-, mid-, late-, and post-career faculty members who are in the red and/or seeing red—do about this state of affairs in our global village? We suggest a trinity of responses. First, recognize we are all in this together. We need to expand our historically- and culturally-delimited brackets and release ourselves from myopic mental models that tie us fearfully or mindlessly to the status quo, which serves the interests of the 1% at the expense of the rest of us, all the while dehumanizing both them and us in the process. Second, let’s educate ourselves and our students, colleagues, friends (virtual and F2F), neighbors, and relatives about the history and nature of money and how to supersede our way into a postmodern epoch worth living in and bequeathing. Nicholas’s narrative and Chomsky’s quote above signal that monetary reform is necessary in order for all to be able to engage in education and for every society to achieve the conditions of the possibility of public education. Third, act. We cannot wait until the private-interest-driven debt-based logic inherent in capitalist relations of production and exchange plays itself out. For there are many different funnels through which the future of human history can come to be; monetary reform is only one possible way forward, albeit the sole humanizing and ecological way. So work for it now, in small and big well-informed ways.

Authors

• Nicholas Daniel Hartlep, Metropolitan State University

• Lucille L.T. Eckrich, Illinois State University