As students at IU, our interests, too, are being subjugated to the interests of capital. As of this year, students pay for 51% of IU’s budget.[ii] Only 18 percent of the current year’s budget funding comes from the state of Indiana, as compared to 50 percent in the early 1990s.[iii] Our professors, the facilities, and the administration are paid for mainly with our debts rather than state or federal funding at this supposedly ‘public school.’ At IUB, administrators receive significant raises and unnecessary administrators are retained, but support staff pay raises fail even to cover the rising costs of healthcare and parking, and staff workloads increase with growing enrollment. The School of Continuing Studies has been cut, forcing working people to pursue degrees at other institutions.[iv] Adjunct faculty and graduate students are relentlessly over-worked and underpaid, and undergraduates suffer in mediocre classes as a result. Pledges by past administrations to increase diversity on campus have been superseded by more profitable investments: though former IU President Adam Herbert elicited a promise from the Board of Trustees to double the percentage of underrepresented minority students at IU in 2006, during Michael McRobbie’s presidency the percentage of black students at IUB has stagnated below 1976 levels, at only 4.1 percent[v]. In IU’s Energy Master Plan for the next two decades, cost-effectiveness is the sole consideration; the grossly destructive effects of climate change and fossil fuel extraction are ignored entirely[vi]. And after an increase of over 45% in tuition and fees over the past six years, costs for students are rising yet again—by over $1000 for resident students in only two years[vii]. Meanwhile, the administration continues to fund the construction of unnecessary new buildings and luxury-style apartment suites in order to attract wealthy students. There is a trend in all of this: university education, like the rest of society, is becoming a marketplace. By 2020, President McRobbie has acknowledged, the state will likely provide only 10% of IU’s budget[viii]. Students are treated as free consumers, but the courses we “take” are investments, and the debt we incur from them will burden us for years to come. Why don’t we have a voice in the university that is equal to our contribution? The rhetoric of “cut-backs” which disguises the push toward marketization is deceptive, and the promises of benefits as a result of this transformation are dishonest. A market-based education system will result in more standardized coursework and sterile campus life for students, increasing career uncertainty and limitations for academics, and the institutionalization of social immobility. The imposition of such a system ought to be opposed, so that education may maintain its liberatory potential. Strike
Years of dialogue on the administration’s terms have failed to improve the situation. Tuition is higher than ever, and the administration is complicit in enacting the legislature’s directives. A strike is recognition of this failure and a rejection of any terms set by the administration. The principle was demonstrated at IU by students throughout the 1970s whenever tuition hikes were proposed: each time, students responded with a mass strike. Resistance has lapsed in recent years, but we can begin again now to exercise our power as students and campus workers. We propose an IU-system wide strike to force an end to campus austerity, to interrupt the administration’s rhetoric of “inevitability,” and to animate the passive student body preferred by the administration with a new sense of confidence and empowerment. During the two days that the trustees meet next April in order to make consequential decisions on our behalf with only token outside input, we want them to be confronted with a campus that we’ve all shut down together. A strike would mean that students boycott classes, professors cancel classes or contribute to teach-ins, and that campus workers call in sick or walk out of work. We understand that there are serious limitations and risks involved, but we are open to dialogue to develop methods that advance the interests of students, faculty, and workers together, on terms that feel empowering and comfortable.
