“University-wide decisions should be made through collective councils of students, faculty, staff, and members of our communities; Finances should be determined through participatory budgeting processes. A co-op college would center supporting students, faculty, and community leaders with the understanding that once they’re taken care of, incredible, creative projects and research will flourish.”

Trebor Scholz interviews Julie Broad and Indigo Olivier. Originally published at Platform.coop.

Trebor Scholz: Julie, you just graduated from The New School. What was your experience?

Julie Broad: I transferred to The New School from McGill, a large research university. The New School is, of course, really different: small classes with engaged, dedicated professors who show care for the students.

Before I graduated in May, I started to get involved with the campaign to unionize our student academic workers, a fight that has been ongoing since 2014. I was working as a research assistant at the time for a really wonderful art history professor at Parsons. I started getting to know our graduate students — some of whom had been my instructors — and the kinds of issues they were facing as workers. I had often thought of The New School as really supportive and intimate compared to McGill’s kind of bureaucratic machinations, but then you start chatting to people about pay disparities, being overworked — and that image falls apart.

The movement for student worker unionization is challenging the way we think about the university. Research and teaching assistants are reasserting themselves — and, in some cases like ours, finally being recognized by the National Labor Relations Board — as workers with the right to have a say in the terms and conditions of their work. But you can only get so far when you don’t own the organization you work in. A cooperatively owned college could go a step further in the public conversation about economic equity. In collaboration with unions, a cooperative college could reshuffle how learning takes place in a way that makes it more affordable and fair to everyone involved.

Indigo Olivier: When I applied to The New School, my father was unemployed, my mother was supporting a family of four on a public school teacher’s salary, and I had a twin brother going to school at the same time as me. The New School did not give me nearly enough financial aid and campus jobs didn’t pay enough to support the cost of living in New York.

I was self-supported throughout my time as a student and set a strict schedule for myself to graduate in three years instead of four to minimize the amount of loans that I had to take out (about $32,000). Rushing through my college experience didn’t allow me to explore all the things that I wanted to explore and working a lot didn’t leave me any time to take up an internship or volunteer my time to social movements if they were off campus.

Going to the financial aid office, I very much got the feeling of being treated like a customer, not a student that’s part of a larger academic community. A co-op college could turn this understanding of what it means to be a student on its head.

TS: In 2012, I proposed a cooperatively operated college that would offer substantive education at drastically lower tuition fees, taught not at the university but in cafes, public libraries, museums, and parks. Do you think that a college operated based on co-op principles could work? What would your ideal college look like?

JB: Sure, I think that if we consider some of the problems with the educational system, cooperatives could be a radical alternative. There’s plenty to change. The magnitude of the student debt crisis alone is overwhelming. Students regularly tell themselves and each other that they just can’t conceptualize what it means to owe $37,000 (national average) by the time they’re twenty-one. Strike Debt and other movements working within the system are creative ways to alleviate a lot of people from crushing debt, but they don’t challenge the system. Students are stressed about their job prospects; educators are stressed about their job security, a lack of meaningful co-governance, and increasing administrative work. Who is this system working for?

An ideal university would be a lot of things, but firstly, I think it’d be a commitment to supporting students financially, so they’re working on research and projects instead of juggling four jobs. I remember a petition, I think spearheaded by students working with Get Artists Paid, going around at the beginning of the summer, asking folks to pressure the board of trustees to stop holding the transcripts of students (primarily students of color) who had unpaid balances. Like Indigo said, there are national and international movements for racial and economic justice that we need to support; addressing the extreme economic disparity happening within the walls of our university is where we should start.

IO: For one thing, in my ideal college, there would be no Board of Trustees. University-wide decisions should be made through collective councils of students, faculty, staff, and members of our communities; Finances should be determined through participatory budgeting processes. A co-op college would center supporting students, faculty, and community leaders with the understanding that once they’re taken care of, incredible, creative projects and research will flourish.

My ideal college would make servicing the wider community its ultimate concern. This means prioritizing research that confronts mass incarceration, climate change, the war in the Middle East, and the erosion of the middle class in a very practical way.

The university president would be elected for a limited number of years. For this position, students and faculty should be able to vote for a social justice leader, labor organizer, or artist; their vision for the university would, therefore, go beyond mere branding and new facilities.

TS: Indigo and Julie, thank you for sharing your experiences so openly. You are not alone. A few years ago, CUNY Professor Cathy Davidson, summed it up: “There is not a person -­‐ students, teachers, administrators -­‐ who believes that the current education system is working.” You’re right: How could students and all people working in universities: from janitors and cashiers to cooks, staff, adjuncts and all faculty be better served?

It’s not like people did not try before. Just think of the student occupations a few years ago, and the many do-it-yourself universities that emerged on the heels of the student protests of 1968. Remember the Free University Movement in Berkeley, Berlin, and many other cities or Mount Holyoke College launched as an experiment of a small consortium of colleges in Massachusetts. Today, there are countless non-accredited learning groups that capitalize on the possibilities that 21st-century networked technologies. There are many examples: Peer to Peer University, Florida Universitaria in Spain, University of the People, Edu Factory, Occupy University, The School for Poetic Computing (founded by a former Parsons professor), and the Brooklyn Institute for Social Research. While these learning collectives are very different in their approaches, most of them do not offer accreditation, and it really is that accreditation that matters to many prospective students.

In the midst of this watershed moment in higher education, what is necessary for positive institutional change is for administrators to provide incentives for innovation and experimentation of programming efforts. A cooperative college would have to be more than an engine of speculative idealism. While cooperatives have always been about bottom-up self-help and autonomy, it’d be important to consider if and how a cooperative college could function within a university that is not a co-op.

JB: I think the broader issue, which a co-op model might be able to address, is economic uncertainty. Who knows how our degrees will hold up when we graduate. A model that allows for more democratic, participatory structuring could free up students and educators to have not only more economic equity, but also take a larger part in controlling what we want to do with the university. A cooperative college could put more control into the hands of people whose futures are largely contingent upon their successes in academia. Such democratic control is the promise of any co-op: respect in and democratic control of the workplace. As the academic worker movement has brought renewed focus to the university as a site of worker exploitation, there’s a lot of room for dialogue about what democratic control could look like.

Giving students a literal stake in the university as owners could, I think, completely change the dynamics of on-campus organizing, whether labor or otherwise. Historically, there are many examples where the labor movement and cooperativism have gone hand-in-hand. Of course, Trebor, you know that these kind of alliances are already being made in the world of platform co-ops, with workers co-ops like Green Taxi in Denver being hugely supported by Communication Workers of America.

IO: We first have to recognize that schools are communities because I think most administration have all but forgotten this fact. The New School is there rhetorically, but in practice it’s an entirely different story. Since the recession, tuition at Eugene Lang The New School for Liberal Arts has gone up 47.6% while the endowment went up by 85.1% from 2010-2015 alone (New School Almanac, pg.140).

The current model of higher education is in crisis but we cannot separate this from the larger crisis of capitalism that has brought about the environmental crisis, the refugee crisis, a crisis of democracy, etc. The role of a cooperative college should be to provide the resources to make sense of these different intersecting crises and then act on them cooperatively with labor, environmental organizers, prison abolitionists, and urban communities outside of the university.

There is absolutely a better way to operate a university, and I don’t think there is any lack of imagination there: CUNY has been working on transforming the student senate to a participatory budgeting model, the Edu-factory collective reimagined the university as the 21st century “factory” where connecting the university to the city could create a new understanding of “the commons” (see: Towards a Global Autonomous University), and groups like the Debt Collective have created new networks that bridge student debtors with mortgage, auto, medical, and credit card debtors.

What is needed to sustain these organizations and projects is a vision that sees the transformation of the economy at large as its ultimate goal. To “fix” the “broken model” of our universities we need to “fix the economy” and vice versa. That means we need to take a global perspective when thinking about co-ops that doesn’t just include our students, faculty, and immediate communities, but also the communities across the world that are, for instance, on the receiving side of the research that our university has been conducting for the Department of Defense since 2002.

TS: I learned from my work with the economical and political movement around platform co-ops how important it is to collaborate with other social movements.

It is peculiar that while democracy has been propagated in many countries throughout the 20th century, it has largely skipped the workplace. Workplace democracy is hard to come by, also in universities. It’s worth exploring the question if the one-worker, one-vote model of co-ops would make sense for institutions of higher education. As you so convincingly point out, the current educational system in the United States does not work. It’s worth exploring if the cooperative model could work for higher learning. For one, co-ops could contribute their core intellectual commitments, anchored in the ICA’s seven co-op principles: 1. Voluntary and Open Membership 2. Democratic Member Control 3. Member Economic Participation 4. Autonomy and Independence 5. Education, Training and Information 6. Cooperation among Co-operatives 7. Concern for Community. What would it mean to apply these principles to a cooperative division of The New School? One place to start could be adult education, returning to the legacy of the 1940s when The New School was a center of continuing education in New York City.

IO: We can agree on certain principles, and I do believe democratic participation is fundamental to both sustaining a co-op university and preparing students for civic engagement after college. Additionally, there have been some interesting ideas proposed that need to be experimented with further: open source unionism, reinvesting endowments, participatory budgeting, and academic councils.

The Women’s Strike this past March was a great example of movements coming into the classroom and the classroom moving out onto the streets. We saw activists, artists, community organizers, and students interacting in ways that probably wouldn’t have occurred if we didn’t all feel this moment of panic with Trump’s election. What we need to do is follow through with “movement moments” and turn them into resilient networks.

TS: It takes practical utopians to imagine a cooperatively operated ‘Ivy League community college.’ What, for example, would be the key tenets of a manifesto of such a cooperatively operated college? It could, for example, be completely learner-administered with all expenses only focusing directly on learning. All members of the university could participate in its day-to-day operation, which would help to keep the costs down. Instructors would function as “learning sommeliers,” or learning coaches. Following Ranciere, professors would not only be in the classroom to impose what they know but rather, to bring out the knowledge that’s already there. Beyond that, the college could heavily rely on open educational resources and all research would be published freely accessible online.

Students could be socialized into non-extractive platforms; they could learn to use social.coop or instead of Twitter and Diaspora instead of Facebook.

Instead of the semester-structure, we could use flexible units that would last, depending on need, any time time from three days to two years. Each group of learners could have an intergenerational mix: pre-­college learners, middle- and high-schoolers, traditionally university-aged students, and retired professionals. There should also be a mix of online and in-person learning to create a continuous, learner-­centered experience that is not restricted to the classroom.

Such co-op college could also be a place to experiment with new models of accreditation such as Mozilla’s Open Badges.

IO: We do need to experiment with models of accreditation. However, without some push from labor in the workplace, I think it’s very likely that alternative forms of accreditation would be discriminated against. This goes back to the need for some larger cultural shift in how we think about learning versus schooling and which one holds more weight in the job market.

I think there is a danger of getting trapped in the “small is beautiful” mentality when we talk about cooperatives. A manifesto would have to take a national and international perspective to be truly transformative. It would have to simultaneously address the labor grievances of academic workers and the future conditions of students who will graduate and be “competing” for jobs with a global workforce that’s predicated on “free trade.”

The student movement of the 1960s understood this pretty well and tried to lay out an analysis of society at large, with “student power” as a means to a larger end. The goal of a co-op university should be replacing competition with cooperation as the ultimate virtue, and then eventually linking up with a larger socialist movement. With student debt fast approaching $1.5 trillion, universities will only help push students further down this path.

JB: This November, a working group of educators, students, and activists is convening in Manchester to parse out what a co-op university would actually look like. Creating a working theoretical model is important, sure, but they’re really after creating something which in practice can challenge the reigning, corporate model of higher ed, at least in the UK. Co-ops can grow and develop within capitalism — that’s the point. We can’t wait for a socialist revolution to get to a decent educational system. A cooperative university — or, to start even smaller, a co-op college within a university — which is academically rigorous, accredited, and democratically owned and governed, needs to prove itself. Let’s grab the market share, as it were, of equitable higher ed so that when socialist reform really starts making waves, we’re already there showing that alternatives are possible.

Julie Broad is a recent graduate from The New School, a writer, and an organizer with United Auto Workers, working on the campaign to unionize academic student workers on campus. | @thatbr0ad

Indigo Olivier is a recent graduate from The New School’s Global Studies program and a freelance journalist. | @IndigoOlivier

Trebor Scholz is a scholar-activist and Associate Professor for Culture & Media at The New School. | @trebors

Image by Miquel Llonch via Stocksy United

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Stein goes even further than Sanders on several key issues, and one of them is her economic platform. She has proposed a “Power to the People Plan” that guarantees basic economic human rights, including access to food, water, housing, and utilities; living-wage jobs for every American who needs to work; an improved “Medicare for All” single-payer public health insurance program; tuition-free public education through university level; and the abolition of student debt. She also supports the reinstatement of Glass-Steagall,  separating depository banking from speculative investment banking; the breakup of megabanks into smaller banks; federal postal banks to service the unbanked and under-banked; and the formation of publicly-owned banks at the state and local level.

Going beyond Bernie, she calls for large cuts to the bloated military budget, which makes up 55% of federal discretionary spending; and progressive taxation, ensuring that the wealthy pay their fair share. Most controversial, however, is her plan to tap up the Federal Reserve. Pointing to the massive sums the Fed produced out of the blue to bail out Wall Street, she says the same resources used to save the perpetrators of the crisis could be made available to its Main Street victims, beginning with the students robbed of their futures by massive student debt.

It Couldn’t Be Done Until It Was

Is tapping up the Fed realistic? Putting aside for the moment the mechanics of pulling it off, the central bank has indeed revealed that it has virtually limitless resources, as seen in the radical “emergency measures” taken since 2008.

The Fed first surprised Congress when it effectively “bought” AIG, a private insurance company, for $80 billion. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi remarked, “Many of us were . . . taken aback when the Fed had $80 billion to invest — to put into AIG just out of the blue. All of a sudden we wake up one morning and AIG has received $80 billion from the Fed. So of course we’re saying, Where’s this money come from?”

The response was, “Oh, we have it. And not only that, we have more.”

How much more was revealed in 2011, after an amendment by Sen. Bernie Sanders to the 2010 Wall Street reform law prompted the Government Accounting Office to conduct the first top-to-bottom audit of the Federal Reserve. It revealed that the Fed had provided a whopping $16 trillion in secret loans to bail out American and foreign banks and businesses during the economic crisis. “This is a clear case of socialism for the rich and rugged, you’re-on-your-own individualism for everyone else,” said Sanders in a press release.

Then there was the shocker of “quantitative easing” (QE), an unconventional monetary policy in which the central bank creates new money electronically to buy financial assets such as Treasury securities and mortgage-backed securities (many of them “toxic”) from the banks. Critics said QE couldn’t be done because it would lead to hyperinflation. But it was done, and that dire result has not occurred.

Unfortunately, the economic stimulus that QE was supposed to trigger hasn’t occurred either. QE has failed because the money has gotten no further than the balance sheets of private banks. To stimulate the demand that will jumpstart the economy, new money needs to get into the real economy and the pockets of consumers.

Why QE Hasn’t Worked, and What Would

The goal of QE as currently implemented is to return inflation to target levels by increasing private sector borrowing. But today, as economist Richard Koo explains, individuals and businesses are paying down debt rather than taking out new loans. They are doing this although credit is very cheap, because they need to rectify their debt-ridden balance sheets in order to stay afloat. Koo calls it a “balance sheet recession.”

As the Bank of England recently acknowledged, the vast majority of the money supply is now created by banks when they make loans. Money is created when loans are made, and it is extinguished when they are paid off. When loan repayment exceeds borrowing, the money supply “deflates” or shrinks. New money then needs to be injected to fill the breach. Currently, the only way to get new money into the economy is for someone to borrow it into existence; and since the private sector is not borrowing, the public sector must, just to replace what has been lost in debt repayment. But government borrowing from the private sector means running up interest charges and hitting deficit limits.

The alternative is to do what governments arguably should have been doing all along: issue the money directly to fund their budgets.

Central bankers have largely exhausted their toolkits, prompting some economists to  recommend some form of “helicopter money” – newly-issued money dropped directly into the real economy. Funds acquired from the central bank in exchange for government securities could be used to build infrastructure, issue a national dividend, or purchase and nullify federal debt. Nearly interest-free loans could also be made by the central bank to state and local governments, in the same way they were issued to rescue an insolvent banking system.

Just as the Fed bought federal and mortgage-backed securities with money created on its books, so it could buy student or other consumer debt bundled as “asset-backed securities.” But in order to stimulate economic activity, the central bank would have to announce that the debt would never be collected on. This is similar to the form of “helicopter money” recently suggested by former Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke to the Japanese, using debt instruments called “non-marketable perpetual bonds with no maturity date” – bonds that can’t be sold or cashed out by the central bank and that bear no interest.

Green Party 2016 presidential candidate Jill Stein. (Gage Skidmore / CC-BY-2.0)

The Bernanke proposal (which he says could also be used by the US Fed in an emergency) involves the government issuing bonds, which it sells to the central bank for dollars generated digitally by the bank. The government then spends the funds directly into the economy, bypassing the banks.

Something similar could be done as a pilot project with student debt, Stein’s favorite target for relief. The US government could pay the Department of Education for the monthly payments coming due for students not in default or for whom payment had been suspended until they found employment. This would free up income in those households to spend on other consumer goods and services, boosting the economy in a form of QE for Main Street.

In QE as done today, the central bank reserves the right to sell the bonds it purchases back into the market, in order to reverse any hyperinflationary effects that may occur in the future. But selling bonds and taking back the cash is not the only way to shrink the money supply. The government could just raise taxes on sectors that are currently under-taxed (tax-dodging corporations and the super-rich) and void out the additional money it collects. Or it could nationalize “systemically important” banks that are insolvent or have failed to satisfy Dodd-Frank “living will” requirements (a category that now includes five of the country’s largest banks), and void out some of the interest collected by these newly-nationalized banks. Insolvent megabanks, rather than being bailed out by the government or “bailed in” by their private creditors and depositors, arguably should be nationalized – not temporarily, but as permanent public utilities. If the taxpayers are assuming the risks and costs, they should be getting the profits.

None of these procedures for reversing inflation would be necessary, however, if the money supply were properly monitored. In our debt-financed system, the economy is chronically short of the money needed to support a dynamic, abundant economy. New money needs to be added to the system, and this can be done without inflating prices. If the money goes into creating goods and services rather than speculative asset bubbles, supply and demand will rise together and prices will remain stable.

Is It in the President’s Toolbox?

Whether Stein as president would have the power to pull any of this off is another question. QE is the province of the central bank, which is technically “independent” from the government. However, the president does appoint the Federal Reserve’s Board of Governors, Chair and Vice Chair, with the approval of the Senate.

Failing that, the money might be found by following the lead of Abraham Lincoln and the American colonists and issuing it directly through the Treasury. But an issue of US Notes or Greenbacks would also require an act of Congress to change existing law.

If Stein were unable to get either of those federal bodies to act, however, she could resort to a “radical” alternative already authorized in the Constitution: an issue of large-denomination coins. The Constitution gives Congress the power to “coin Money [and] regulate the value thereof,” and Congress has delegated that power to the Treasury Secretary. When minting a trillion dollar platinum coin was suggested as a way around an artificially imposed debt ceiling in January 2013, Philip Diehl, former head of the U.S. Mint and co-author of the platinum coin law, confirmed:

In minting the $1 trillion platinum coin, the Treasury Secretary would be exercising authority which Congress has granted routinely for more than 220 years. The Secretary authority is derived from an Act of Congress (in fact, a GOP Congress) under power expressly granted to Congress in the Constitution (Article 1, Section 8).

The power just needs to be exercised, something the president can instruct the Secretary to do by executive order.

In 1933, President Franklin Roosevelt engaged in a radical monetary reset when he took the dollar off the gold standard domestically. The response was, “We didn’t know you could do that.” Today the Federal Reserve and central banks globally have been engaging in radical monetary policies that have evoked a similar response, and the sky has not fallen as predicted.

As Stein quotes Alice Walker, “The most common way people give up their power is by thinking they don’t have any.”

The runaway success of Sanders and Trump has made it clear that the American people want real change from the establishment Democratic/Republican business-as-usual that Hillary represents. But real change is not possible within the straitjacket of a debt-ridden, austerity-based financial scheme controlled by Wall Street oligarchs. Radical economic change requires radical financial change, as Roosevelt demonstrated. To carry the baton of revolution to the finish line requires revolutionary tools, which Stein has shown she has in her toolbox.

Cross-posted from Truthout and originally titled “Can Jill Stein Carry Sanders’ Baton? A Look at the Green Candidate’s Radical Funding Solution”

Photo by 401(K) 2013

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