“Work with us” is the mantra of the modern university administrator. Collaborate. Compromise. Be polite and considerate, and you will be heard. You have a voice. We will listen.
Brown Divest Coal did everything right. Its members collected petitions. They held peaceful and nondisruptive rallies. They put together a mountain of compelling and irrefutable research. They did not occupy University Hall. They did not indict the Corporation for being fundamentally illegitimate or corrupt. This is not a critique: Divest Coal very reasonably believed the Corporation wouldn’t be so pigheadedly captured by Wall Street that it would oppose something as uncontroversially and obviously right as coal divestment.
As a member of the Advisory Committee on Corporate Responsibility in Investment Policies — and I do not speak for the committee — I watched as Divest Coal put together an airtight case. The group was incredibly patient and hardworking as we asked for more research. The committee overwhelmingly approved coal divestment. I saw the president struggle against our recommendation, asking for “alternatives.” The committee gave her alternatives and politely and firmly stated that they were inferior to divestiture, and that the divestment case was airtight. Divest Coal went to the right forums, said the right things, jumped through the right hoops. It played the game.
It didn’t work. Students ran up against the brutal reality that members of the Corporation simply will not act counter to the interests of the wealthy. They’ll try to paper over it with long, nonsensical emails that boil down to “we think, with little or no basis, that it might not work and so we will not do it.” But fundamentally, that’s what this is all about: protecting themselves and their industry pals. Divestment directly targets the corporate system behind environmental degradation, and the Corporation just wouldn’t go along with it. They wouldn’t even put it to a vote.
And why would they? The Corporation is Wall Street. Bankers, corporate lawyers, CEOs and other investors make up over 60 percent of corporate membership. There is no reason these people should be running a university, other than to protect and enrich their own industries. Yet here they are, and we can no longer be surprised when they act accordingly.
They will continue to prioritize glitzy expansion over financial aid. They will continue enriching destructive industries. They will continue to ignore the needs of Providence, destroying other neighborhoods as they destroyed Fox Point. They will continue to ignore the needs of students, faculty members and workers whenever they come into conflict with the needs of those who see Brown as a moneymaking machine.
The solution is clear. Ditch the Corporation. It makes no sense to have rich people buy their ways in. Donations should buy names on buildings, not governance. This idea is not new, original or untried — abandon the unaccountable Corporation and have students, faculty members and staff members run the school.
Democratic cities and towns across the country let citizens run their governments with higher stakes. Universities, particularly in Europe, function under real student and faculty governance all the time. There is no reason for to have a banker run a university. The Corporation as it exists is good for the rich and the powerful. It’s not good for Providence, it’s not good for the world and it’s certainly not good for us.
For years, student groups have fought issue-by-issue. At every turn, they encounter bias among the administration toward corporate interests. We are experiencing the hard limit of this strategy. Coal divestment was an uncontroversial and relatively low-impact piece of action, and the Corporation simply couldn’t get it done.
All the individual fights students are engaged in with the University — on workers’ rights, racial justice, women’s rights, queer justice, antiwar, the environment — are vitally important, and we can’t afford to fight them alone anymore. The deck is stacked. Students don’t have a voice, workers don’t have a voice, even the faculty doesn’t have much of a voice.
Cynics will say this is the way it is, and this is how it’s always going to be. Brown was founded by and for the rich, and we shouldn’t expect anything else. But the cynics are wrong. This place is filled with people who care about Brown, Providence and the world. This university is us, and many of us have no interest in being a cog in a heedless, destructive machine, in underwriting the violence the University perpetrates against its own students and workers, along with the world at large.
Administrators have had the benefit of decades of relative student inaction. The flip side is that when action comes, they won’t know how to deal with it. If we organize, we have the power to tear the Corporation down and replace it with a democratic system that works.
The wrong response would be to double down on the strategy of playing good cop with the Corporation. Another wrong response would be to grit our teeth and accept our powerlessness until we graduate and move on. The right response is to accept that Brown is complicit in a huge amount of injustice and to change it with radical direct action. Students are ready to to take this on. President Christina Paxson and the Corporation will hear from us.
Daniel Moraff ’14 can be reached at daniel_moraff@brown.edu.
ADVERTISEMENT
