Buying Out: Of Capitulation and Contestation

• Published in: Theory & event 2012-07, Vol.15 (3), p.N_A
• Main Author: Massumi, Brian
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Subjects: Associations; Breach of contract; Criminalization; Demonstrations & protests; Education; Freedom of speech; Neoliberalism; Politics; Preemption; Service industries; Students
• ISSN: 2572-6633; 1092-311X

Professors at many universities and colleges were warned by their administrations that they would be in breach of contract and could face disciplinary action or dismissal if they expressed support for the student strike, or even if they let it be known to the students that they wouldn't penalize them for participating (for example, by giving them incomplete marks and making catch-up plans for missed work).3 These decrees not only defined the student's exercise of their rights of association as a priori illegitimate, it inducted the professoriat into the role of enforcers of administrative fiat. [...]education is preempted as a social and political issue. According to this logic, the university, like every sector of life, must be subordinated to the imperatives of the market. A particularly telling expression of the conversion of human life into human capital was published in a recent New York Times article in which a business school professor of entrepreneurship suggested a financial-market solution to the looming student debt crisis in the United States, which some analysts are worried will turn into a bubble not unlike the 2007 mortgage crisis: set up a system where private investors fund individual students' educations in return for a percentage of their lifetime future income.