Who Runs Our Universities?: Debt's Shadow Governance and How to Organize for Change

The future of public higher education is being held hostage by financial institutions and actors. How did it get this way? 

Lend & Rule reveals the “shadow governance” of debt and credit in the United States higher education system. With sharp and hard-hitting insight, the Coalition Against Campus Debt exposes how institutional debt is a primary driver of university austerity, miseducation, and the deepening of societal inequality.

Addressing how our lives are entangled in a debt economy, they develop the analysis necessary to transform higher education in today’s neoliberal racial capitalist political economy.

Part theoretical analysis, part toolbox for organizers in higher education, Lend & Rule is an invaluable resource for anyone engaged in debt abolition struggles or looking to acquire a critical and transformative vision of higher education today.

Coalition Against Campus Debt is a collective of educators and organizers active in higher education struggles as well as the debt abolition movement more widely for over a decade. Members include Jazon Wozniak, Eleni Schirmer, Dana Morrison, Joanna Gonsalves, Richard Levy, Maria del Mar Rosa Rodriguez, Sofya Aptekar, Tracy Berger, and Barbara Madeloni.

Jason Thomas Wozniak is an assistant professor in the Educational Foundations and Policy Studies Department at West Chester University of Pennsylvania. He codirects the Latin American Philosophy of Education Society (lapes.org) and serves as an organizer with the Debt Collective.

Eleni Schirmer is a research associate with the Future of Finance Initiative at the University of California, Los Angeles, Luskin Institute on Inequality and Democracy. She holds a PhD from the University of Wisconsin, Madison in Educational Policy Studies.

Dana Morrison is an assistant professor in the Educational Foundations and Policy Studies Department at West Chester University of Pennsylvania and chapter secretary of the Association of Pennsylvania State College and University Faculties.

Joanna Gonsalves is a psychology professor at Salem State University and chapter vice president of the Massachusetts State College Association faculty union.