In the spirit of collegiality and to foster academic debate, I am using my blog space to host Professor Ross’s response to my earlier post about his call for students to default on their student loans. I am doing this because more important than either of our viewpoints is the need for the academic community to carefully consider both the rights and responsibilities of the academic freedom they enjoy. I should note that having spent the first 13 years as a faculty member, and the next 10 as a public policy leader, I have indeed spent more than 30 seconds contemplating academic freedom. In addition, I did not call for Professor Ross to be fired, but instead suggested that NYU silence him on this particular issue in order to protect students and uphold the institution’s Title IV Program Participation Agreement, which requires students to be educated about their obligations to repay their loans. —Diane
From Andrew Ross:
As a member of the AAUP’s Committee A on Academic Freedom, I attend a lot of meetings where we deliberate at great length over the niceties of academic freedom. From the evidence of her column, it doesn’t seem as if Diane Auer Jones has spent more than 30 seconds reflecting on the topic. That would be tragic enough for anyone who works in the business of education, though it appears that, in her workplace at least, business is more important than education. No surprise then, to find her resorting to personalized attack, a tactic more appropriate to Fox cable shows than the pages of The Chronicle. But regardless of the mode of attack, her call for academics to be fired over their speech rights will be welcomed in neo-McCarthyist quarters by those for whom it was no doubt intended.
If she had done any homework, she would have found that my views are part of a campaign, fully laid out at www.occupystudentdebtcampaign, that is the product of a consensus-based working group at Occupy Wall Street. Ms. Jones must surely know that mass default is already occurring. Our campaign was launched to give debtors an alternative to suffering the agony and humiliation of debt and default in personal isolation. Those who sign the pledge of refusal are part of a collective act of public dissent and therefore in a position, potentially, to contest the outcome.
This campaign is a response to the dependency of U.S. higher education on debt-financing from the people it is supposed to serve. There is no justice in a system that openly invites profiteering on the part of lenders. Education is a right and a public good, and it should be properly funded as such. The campaign, moreover, is based on moral principles that are firmly accepted within the Occupy movement, but we believe they are widely shared beyond it too.
• Free Public Education: The federal government should cover the costs of tuition at two- and four-year colleges and universities. The estimated cost is a little over $70-billion, a small price to pay for the U.S. joining the long list of countries, all of them less affluent, that offer tuition-free higher education.
• Interest-Free Student Loans: Paying for an education is not the same as buying a car or a flat screen TV, and so loans should not packaged as if they were consumer credit.
• Fiscal Transparency: Private and for-profit colleges, which are debt-financed, tax-exempt, and beneficiaries of federal largess, should open their books. Students have a right to know where their tuition dollars are being spent and allocated.
• Debt Burden Write-Off: The current debt burden, which is unpayable in debtors’ lifetimes, should be written off, as part of a debt jubilee.
I don’t expect Ms. Jones to understand, let alone sympathize, with the Occupy process, but the principles are there for her to debate if she will drop her alarmist, ad hominem mode in order to do so.
