Two protests that occurred earlier this week were close — both in proximity and, somewhat paradoxically, causality.
The first, the three-day “Showdown in Chicago,” started on Sunday and targeted overzealous, haughty bankers partially responsible for the economic collapse.
The second was on Monday, when the Campaign to Organize Graduate Students union and other indignant graduate students decried a more immediate foe: budget cuts and, more specifically, potential TA cuts.
UI graduate student Jake Altman, along with about a dozen other COGS members, originally intended to protest in Chicago. Instead, Altman opted to picket Monday on the Pentacrest, seeing it as a chance to protest locally and break free of the scholarly inaction he normally feels.
“The workload makes it difficult for us to engage in local events,” said Altman, who contends that universities are structured to prevent social change from within.
The two protests may seem relatively unrelated, but Altman’s interest in both underscores an important point: The financial collapse has intimately affected college students — and we must be catalysts for systemic change.
Altman saw an additional parallel.
“The crisis has hit everyone hard because the people at the top [university administrators and bankers] refuse to bear the brunt of a collapse that happened on their watch as a direct result of their policies and politics,” he wrote in an e-mail. “Instead, they insist on putting the burden on students, university employees, and all the folks who do not make six-figure salaries.”
I wouldn’t go that far. While I agree UI administrators have largely shirked necessary pay-cut sacrifices, I don’t see top administrators such as President Sally Mason as nefarious actors who, through their horrible decision-making, have caused the deep budgetary cuts.
But one thing is undeniably clear: The actions of an unregulated financial elite (and, arguably, Federal Reserve mismanagement and superfluous government incentives for homeownership) sank the economy and have affected us all, college students included. And that collapse is forcing state regents and university administrators to make some incredibly tough decisions.
The once little-known — and still esoteric — credit-default swap has had more of an effect on the average college student than he or she could have ever predicted. Effete regulators (and a lack of regulation in the first place) have indirectly caused plummeting state revenue, budget cuts, and increasingly indigent students.
You can blame the supercilious financial elite for the potential $100 tuition surcharge, for the declining funding for higher education, and for indirectly causing nearly every other budget slash students will have to absorb.
It seems the UI Foundation — whose donations have remained relatively buoyant despite the economic recession, spokeswoman Susan Shullaw said — is virtually the only unscathed.
I’m no economist, but it’s clear there need to be some fundamental changes in our economy. When a handful of financial giants can bring the nation’s economy to its collective knees, something is horribly wrong.
We need to break up financial institutions that are “too big to fail” and supposedly warrant a free pass from basic free-market principles. And we must move away from an economy dominated by the financial sector.
As economist and New York Times columnist Paul Krugman astutely wrote earlier this year, the banking sector was fine when it stuck to simple borrowing and lending. Indeed, it “serviced an economy that doubled living standards over the course of a generation.”
My other favorite economist, Joseph Stiglitz, has been similarly sagacious in recent months. The Nobel laureate has advocated for greater public and private investment and moving away from finance-driven growth and overconsumption.
In order to change all of this, we need to embrace the iconoclasm embodied in the two protests this week.
Although the respective protests were disparate, students should recognize another commonality: They were picketing for us.
