Every so often, we hear that x percent of Americans don't know their own congressman. We are then supposed to nod sagely and share a chuckle about dumb, ignorant Americans. But here at Brown, our lives are mostly run by the Corporation, and we generally have no idea who they are.
Fifty-two people rule this University. Forty on the Board of Trustees, 12 on the Board of Fellows, which combined hold essentially all governing power. So out of the 52 people who guide our destiny, how many would you guess are executives in the financial industry?
Take a minute. Relax. Go someplace where you can sob quietly in peace. This is, in fact, the number of people on the Corporation from the financial industry:
Twenty-six.
Twenty-six of the 52 people that run our lives are employed by a grim assortment of hedge funds, mutual funds, banks and venture capital firms. Twenty-six of them.
Twenty-six.
Add in three more people from law firms. All of them corporate. One is with Skadden, which Vault.com ranks the third-most prestigious law firm in the world and "Wall Street's most powerful law firm," with annual revenue of $2.17 billion. The second is with with Sullivan and Cromwell, Vault.com's fourth-most prestigious law firm with a speciality in corporate mergers and an annual revenue of $1.08 billion. The third has bounced around from the auto industry to the oil industry.
We've got the chairman of a communications company, the owner of multiple textile firms, the president of an importing company and the CEO of Fandango. We also have a couple of management consultants and four high-powered media executives.
Three-quarters of the Corporation are very wealthy people with the perspective of very wealthy people. "The 1 percent" is the 75 percent. This isn't some random fluke - in a system where one gets on the Corporation by writing Brown a big check, power is essentially bought. It's plutocracy in its rawest, most hideously pure form.
The point isn't that the super-rich have nothing to offer. To the contrary, they are likely to be very good at keeping money rolling into this University, and I'm sure many of them are well-meaning administrators. The point is that the super-rich tend to have a certain perspective on what matters and what doesn't. When the Corporation seems to embody the worst of the corporate world - valuing profit-friendly sciences over the humanities, treating workers with contempt, focusing on glitzy and luxurious buildings rather than on the University's core mission - it shouldn't surprise us. When the University's government looks like a Wall Street board meeting, the University will act like Wall Street.
It's not surprising that we as students are generally apathetic toward the Corporation. After all, students have no power, and it's a big leap to engage with something when you have no power. It's a bizarre, autocratic system, but it's one more easily ignored than changed. It's just the way it is and the way it has always been. And so, inevitably, tuition keeps rising as the business-friendly sciences keep expanding and the University is run mainly as a tool of corporate America.
But it doesn't have to be this way. We didn't vote for these people. The faculty didn't vote for these people. The unions didn't vote for these people. Only alums got to vote, and even they only elect 14 members. University policy affects us as much as any local or national government, and we have no say. None. It flies in the face of everything we believe in.
At the end of the day, it's not the Corporation's fault. They can't help being a bunch of millionaires and (at least two) billionaires. We have to make the call whether or not we're confident that these millionaires and billionaires understand the bite of tuition hikes, the importance of wages and benefits and the social mission of a University beyond educating a bunch of good corporate employees.
If we want a school that works as more than a cog in the financial system, we have to take things into our own hands. Brown should be run by students, faculty and employees, not by a bunch of executives distinguished by their talent for moneymaking. Democracy has to be more than an abstract concept - it has to be something we actually believe in and fight for, or our University will continue to be twisted by the wealthy plutocrats who run it.
Students in Quebec successfully went on strike and won, defeating outrageous tuition hikes just this year. We do have power if we ever decide to use it. A healthy injection of democracy into University governance would work wonders.
Daniel Moraff '14 can be reached at daniel_moraff@brown.edu.
